Funnily enough that was one of the things Golden Gate fixed, at least for me on my M1.

These visual UI problems which are showing some sloppiness in the UI is much better than macOS 26 and honestly I really like Golden Gate for more efficiency and the fact that Siri actually works now and can replace a great deal of things I usually would have googled.

Can Golden Gate really be considered a fix release for Tahoe with its massive AI updates?

The main menu bar sometimes gets darker.

I had this happen after toggling the menu bar background / Liquid Glass transparency settings a couple times. I think a window (from Firefox) somehow got positioned slightly behind the menu bar, which was causing it to take its color from the window instead of my desktop background when it was on top.

Find the window, then Option + maximize button should fix it.

Liquid Glass actually looks like glass now, the weird side panel changes in apps is reverted, music slider hitbox hiccups are now fixed, etc.

It's just 26 but better. On my personal macbook I upgraded from 15 to 27 directly.

We are seeing the benefits in real time in this release if those images mean anything lol

A friend who quit Apple a month or two ago left mostly because the whole company was utterly AI-pilled and they couldn’t take being a meat proxy talking to other meat proxies any more.

I sure ain’t upgrading my Mac any time soon if I can help it.

Maybe they should try replacing some of their product managers with AI

These are the benefits.

It looks like Tahoe is about to become the new Snow Leopard.

What I notice is that the entire OS feels very laggy. Many interactions just don’t feel as snappy anymore as before. The worst candidate for this is definitely Mission Control, it has become a total dumpster fire in my opinion. (BTW: running on an M4 Pro MBP)

Yes, IIRC System Preferences was fine (hopefully not rose-tinted glasses), it became the current piece of shit when it was reborn as iOS-sibling System Settings, in Ventura?

Maybe Apple ported the Spotlight algorithm over for the System Settings search? Spotlight has, well, unique properties that take extra effort to achieve in a search system.

same here, glad I didn't update to Golden Gate when it was released, even if I was tempted.

I haven't noticed any bigger bugs (Apart from search in System Settings still not working), the main annoyance is the Siri bubble showing up next to text fields.

At least Gnome doesn't have liquid glass

Are you crazy? libadwaita looks way, way more polished and consistent than anything I've seen on macos for the last at least 5 years. And only one of these is an open-source project with a limited budget.

TIL there’s a nice Linux clone of the Mac UI https://blogs.gnome.org/alicem/files/2023/09/header.png

It’s 25 years old at this point and got lapped by Gnome & kde at least 10 years ago.

It’s time for some apple internal honesty about the state of MacOS gui.

am I the only one not liking the black tint in Spotlight?

What about they list of places where search doesn't work or the menu crashes or is very slow? Does that count, chief?

Yes, fair.

MacOS has felt like AI slop since before there was AI. I'm a decades long mac user, and there's simply no excuse for how sloppy their releases have become

If the future Steve Jobs is out there hopefully he's working on Windows, Linux, with a dash of Android...

It could be that those bugs are Claude or Codex works of art.

In the not so distant future we'll just ask Claude to rewrite the entire MacOS from scratch without those bugs :)

Have they fixed getting a name server over VPN?

macOS 15 is the last usable release.

Same. Will sell my Air when security updates stop for Sequoia

10.5 Leopard was my peak. 10.6 Snow Leopard improved on its stability but had a touch of visible regretion (in my opinion). After that, I haven't really been happy with any release. Obviously some things have improved but... 10.5 was branded Unix, the UI was beautiful. It felt solid.

Stayed on Catalina for a few versions, if I was stuck for 4 years it would be fine. 2027 is the YOTLD ;)

Yes, it is. How can’t you follow this logic? It is an upwards trajectory. Genuinely, what are you missing about this? Two things can be true at the same time. Nobody said that there had been a historical downward trajectory. Well, at least, in your description of what “gets you”. But I’ve never really seen many people arguing that macOS hasn’t degraded over the past ~10-15 years. The fact that’s “getting you” s still worth noting and not every online comment has to be a complete, comprehensive accounting of someone’s entire position. Some things are just left unsaid because there’s a shared understanding. At this point I think that “macOS had generally gotten worse” is easily one of those.

The problem with stating that 27 is an improvement over 26 is that it's ignoring the elephant in the room.

You’re over thinking things. People made a closed statement. It isn’t meant as a multiple paragraph essay on the progression of macOS over the timeline of 20 years. But that doesn’t make the statement any less valid.

It doesn't make any sense for the conversation to just stop there

The conversation didn’t stop there. We are having it still right now.

and implicitly forgive all of the regressions 26 brought as water under the bridge.

That’s not what the aforementioned statement claims. You’re adding your own emphasis here, an emotive slant which skews the statement to mean something it didn’t.

macOS 15 isn't just some nebulous hypothetical alternative, it's a readily-available example of what Apple actually shipped in recent history, and it should be a point of reference in discussions like this. Narrowly focusing on 27 vs 26 while ignoring 15 doesn't make any more sense than praising Windows 8.1 for fixing some problems from Windows 8 when neither was worth upgrading from Windows 7 for most people.

The reason 15 was referenced was because it’s an incremental improvement rather than introducing big new features. Just like 27 is. So in that regard, it makes more sense to compare 27 to 26 than include all of the other points of reference that you are.

———

I’m usually the first to criticise macOS. I only hate it slightly less than Windows. But you’re making emotive claims to an objective statement and complaining that others aren’t doing the same.

I'm still on Sequoia and waiting for things to get better. Thankfully I don't do dev work for Apple platforms anymore.

iMessage (Messages) doesn't work for me after upgrading. Downgrading to macOS 26 looks to be a chore so I guess I'm just SOL until it gets patched.

Yeah, I am quite sad that I am packing up and shipping off my nifty little Intel MacBook Pro and for the first time ever, I'm wondering if I can do without a Mac, not even really wanting one.... the one form factor which sort of appeals is a Wacom Movink 13 w/ a Mac Mini (but I hate that the screen is so low resolution and none of the Cintiq Pros use the same stylus as my other stylus devices (Kindle Coloursoft, Samsung Galaxy Note and Book)

I find that Siri AI cannot really do anything that I need, which is my major problem. I was truly hoping for Shortcuts to be a bit more beefed up with the introduction of Siri AI. For example, I was hoping that Siri AI could fix some of my annoyances like dismissing all notification banners. Of course, Siri AI cannot see nor work with notifications, so that's a huge bummer.

For normies, it might be nice to be able to add n > 1 reminders or calendar events, fix some grammatical errors, or whatever, but that's not particularly useful for me. I was hoping for a bit more of an AI that is truly integrated with the OS. Meanwhile, I feel like it's the worst model Gemini has to offer.

Man, on my iPhone (15 Pro), it's been a letdown.

"Please play this song on my HomePod". "Now playing"

Prolonged silence.

"Nothing is playing?"

"Now playing" (but on my iPhone, not my HomePod)

I should be writing these down, because pretty much every interaction ends in disappointment.

Feels like it's just as mediocre as old Siri, only more ambitious when it fails, and slower.

many things are way faster. for example, photos sync in the Photo app across devices instantly, app launches, airdrop transfers, etc..

Yeah, I install point updates, just not the annual ones. AFAICT, I'm still getting the security patches that I need.

My company IT forced us to upgrade to Tahoe :(

Deliberately keeping it 15.x on my M3 Max.

While generally happy with the speed improvements it brought, I can't back question the presence of testers on Apple side. Sure they are a small niche company (/s) but they can do better. Major example, desktop switching shortcuts are borked after device comes up from sleep! >https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1whtmc3/macos_27_mis...

The funny fact is that they didn't add any new feature to Mission Control, they just rewrote it and broke it in the process.

I’ve been experiencing much of the same as well. There seems to be some kind of oversight over keeping previously stabilized affordances intact through each upgrade, at least in the past couple of years. It’s my theory that it’s likely to do with some kind of newly introduced AI steps in their process which doesn’t care so much about small nuanced ui spots like this but check plenty of other boxes.

Another instance in watch os is the total removal of access to the app switcher And quick jump to precious app. It’s been driving me nuts.

oh, speak of the devil… yeah there's an issue where full screen apps don't show the "stoplight" icons on hover… sometimes it takes several seconds, sometimes (with Slack just now) they never appear.

I've given up on filing radars, feels like talking about your relationship to a housecat.

I use Spaces very heavily and it is amazing how much they borked it up. Even 27.0.1 is not helping it.

Ugh, how annoying. Thanks.

Moving an application window to another space without a mouse would also be nice. I've only wanted it for, like, the past 10-15 years. Snow Leopard even had that ability. Why was it removed? That's beyond me.

I have had to work around it with the most hacky scripts possible, and it's been so annoying trying to maintain all those scripts over the years.

Rename spaces + move to them by name. At one point I had a hacky buggy mess of a (Quicksilver, I think) addon that let me do this, and it was the best, even though it crashed my computer a couple of times a week.

Does anyone know how to do this, nowadays? I've lost hope that Apple will make it a native feature.

I’ve experienced spaces shortcuts not working suddenly throughout the Tahoe release at least, so I doubt it’s specifically related to Golden Gate. They could have made it worse somehow of course.

Spaces have been nearly unusably bad for a very long time in MacOS. I used them heavily, but in frustration, have simply given up on them completely. They're simply too unreliable and inconsistent, even when they're at their best.

I had a fun one where clicks stopped registering sometimes and right clicks didn’t register sometimes and my mouse disappeared randomly.

I thought my machine was broken. Turns out this is a known bug with window managers (????????)

The sporadic nature of it had me question my own sanity.

Welp, sounds like another year running Sequoia for me.

Also am I tripping or is anti-aliasing missing from the previews now? It looks like glitter when they’re moving and I swear it wasn’t like that before.

Look at Apple's market cap and salary ranges before reading this article.

not to mention that the Music app that has been completely destroyed in macOS 26 is still completely unusable

Thank you, I'm stealing this

Just AI it /s

Generally speaking, same. I haven't noticed any major bugs at all.

I've been running the beta on my machines. Definitely a huge upgrade over Tahoe. Visually and performance-wise.

I do the same thing, except I usually run a version for two-three years and skip some OS releases in-between.

My recent upgrade was from Ventura to Sequoia, and I will likely move to Golden Gate at some point next summer right before Sequoia's support period expires (this happens in July or August). Over years it meant that I avoided some of the famous bugs like the discoveryd fiasco in Yosemite (I went from Maverics to El Capitan).

The one downside is that I sometimes have a to go through a huge app redesigns or big feature changes that have been accumulating over several versions. I ignore most of them and probably don't get as much value from the OS as I could have.

The golden rule is becoming, never update. But then, I used Snow Leopard until El Capitan, and could no longer get software updates I needed.

As someone who used to upgrade every year in my younger days, it feels weird to completely agree with you. Half the time I move to a new OS, it's because I got a new computer. I haven't upgraded my M2 MBA from 2022 ever.

My rule has been a 1 year delay but that sometimes makes life hard for Xcode/APIs or changes where your iOS and macOS device must both update for certain features. I bit the bullet and upgraded to 26 after about 6 months but updated to 27 within days because it had to be better than 26, and it is, there are just still a lot of issues.

I think it was May for me for MacOS 26. I immediately updated to 27. Despite the various bugs, it is still a solid improvement. iOS 27 was also provided huge performance boost to my 5 year old phone!

This is a usual crap Apple has turned to, other things are so fucked up, so I’d close my eyes on the former. E.g.:

Apple (iCloud) Data Recovery works only if you deleted files from Drive via GUI, which places them in Trash.

So you actually do have them. Whaat? Why would you need a recovery? Good question.

Now it gets really interesting: you’ve emptied the Trash and now wanna to recover some.

But they are no more. Gone. Can’t be recovered anymore.

And there is a reason of course: because fuck you, that’s why.

And it’s documented FYI, so it’s a feature.

Checkmate.

Linux world hasn't even settled on what display system to use.

Thank you for this; this has been driving me nuts the past week and it never once occurred to me it might be a genuine issue with the new OS and not my double-click muscles beginning to fail.

Occasionally drag'n'drop failures —where it just stops working— I experienced already with Yosemite, so it may be a VERY old bug. :) Usually you would see "CoreDragError" codes popping up in the system.log

Rather than rebooting, I just kill "pboard" in Activity Monitor, and afterwards restart a few GUI programs that were directly affected (including Finder and Dock.)

My wild theory is that Firefox is the culprit. At least the issues happened more frequently once I had to switch to Firefox for proper content blocking extensions. Anyway… I have no idea how to prove that, so it's just a guess, not a blame.

Well, I've been sitting on Sequoia this whole time, because I decided to sit Tahoe out, based on what I heard on HN. Maybe I'll sit Golden Gate out too!

My favorite thing they broke is that there is no longer an animation when launching and dismissing Spotlight in its Launchpad mode (i.e 4 finger pinch on trackpad). I mean there is an animation, but it's only visible if I'm pinching slowly. If I do it at normal speed, there's just a half-second delay and then it pops in or out.

I suspect they made the animation so heavy that it reaches its deadline before it even starts, so it gets skipped.

Not sure if it's better or worse than Tahoe, where the animation (mostly) worked but app icons either popped in all at once a bit later or were rendered one by one from top-left to bottom-right.

It's such a buggy mess. When using my Mac these days I miss the polish of my Linux desktop.

they may have fixed audio bugs but it broke ableton was my main complaint.

They didn't fix one pretty big audio bug (or possibly introduced it?) which bit me the other day: I attempted to use an aggregate audio device consisting of the headphone jack and a USB audio interface. Randomly every few minutes, the outputs would get rearranged and my audio would get routed to the wrong places. It was definitely the aggregate device, since it hasn't happened again since I switched to just the USB interface.

Golden gate has been ok-ish for me. I am more annoyed by the constant render stutters in iOS. It got worse with iOS 26 (tested on iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air) and it is still pretty bad with iOS 27 (tested on iPhone Air and iPhone 18 Pro).

Some apps like the App Store or Mastodon are a complete stutter fest, even when you let them preload all assets. But it even happens in very basic apps like the Settings app.

Meanwhile my woefully underpowered Pixel 10 Pro (on par with a flagship from a few years ago) with GrapheneOS is butter smooth in nearly every app.

watchOS 27 broke noise monitoring.

I have this, on Tahoe, and tracked it to Zoom. Still have no clue WHY, but it appears when I join a meeting and stays until I disconnect. It’s very annoying.

Yeah the iPhone liquid glass update made everything so glitchy and slow. Mac updates haven't been a big problem, just slight downgrades.

This one really bugs me. Could be my setup (have a few Menu-bar utilities). Anyway... I do Finder Searches a lot to find files in the current directory or system-wide using either find by file name or file contains. Get a list of files fine in response. Then close the search, and my Finder window is blank. Have to click to another folder in the Sidebar, then back to my original folder to get the full folder contents to show. All previous OS versions returned back to list all the files.

Also not a bug, but a bad recession ihmo. I always used to have Finder>Show-Hidden-Files option on. Now it is always off, and one must Cmd+Shift+. to show hidden files each time one opens a directory. Why take that option away ??

If anyone has insights about what might be causing my blank "after search" window, and/or a way to make show hidden files the default please advise. Thx, NSC

Every time I read one of these types of posts, I never have any idea what the author is talking about.

Well, even ignoring Claude’s capabilities, you would expect human testers (whether Apple employees or external beta testers) to be creating bug reports for all these things. It’s embarrassing if your self-proclaimed bug-fix/stability release is buggy and unstable. If the bugs are filed, then Claude should be able to help fix them.

Mac OS has become an absolute travesty of an OS

It's the worst desktop OS there is.. except for all the others.

I hope that with Opus 5.5 they will be able to fix more bugs in the next version of macos, in the meantime I will stay on Sonoma. This is really disappointing since Golden Gate was supposed to be a bugfix update

I think those clicks and pops are a Chromium issue. The Spotify desktop app uses Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). I use to hear those all the time when using Chrome and they've mostly disappeared now that I mostly use FF.

Opens with a reference to Snow Leopard, I miss it to this day.

The Mac User Guide on the site was updated to Golden Gate on launch day. There were lingering server-side cache issues that would occasionally display the Tahoe version to some users.

These should have been fixed as of a couple weeks now.

Anyone still seeing Tahoe? If so, please reply with the URL you are visiting.

Well, it looks like they care more than 1 year ago, so there’s hope still.

Yeah but the outer bit is still circular!

I personally haven’t noticed any serious bugs yet, but I can’t help but notice how jittery the animations have become compared to just two versions before. It doesn’t feel “smooth” anymore even on new hardware.

NeXTSTEP. Grandparent is wrong.

Search this document for "Historical Note" for the canonical explanation:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

The convention is a holdover. It does not mean that the code is the same. There’s plenty of NS classes that did not exist before OS X.

What would you say the letters NS stand for? Perhaps "Not Standforanything"?

Interesting, that one actually seems to be fixed on Golden Gate.

iirc these aren’t native menus. Firefox builds their own. I found this out when scratching my head why I couldn’t find “Look Up” in the right click menu in Firefox.

Oh, hyperbole and a half. It's a useable OS.

- Centring _is_ important! How dare you!

- Same for me now. Wasn't when I used it a few days ago.

- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

- Very pedantic, I know. But look at some of the other icons close up, lots contain tiny details very few ever see (try the Mail app, the icon of a text file, or the loupe on the old Preview icon). That obsessive attention to detail feels like it's now in the past.

- Yeah could well be Firefox's fault. But it surfaced in Golden Gate, so I included it.

- You can trace anything NS* back to NeXTSTEP

- Not for me!

- :)

This is a little simplistic. Investing more in the quality component of the org - valuable.

TM3 is basically "if this is your approach to shipping more quickly you're going to have a bad time."

If they can’t get stuff you think is easy right, it saps your trust that they got the things you think are harder right.

Centering is not easy. Apparently. It requires human eye to verify. I can prove my decryption algorithm works. I can’t prove centering works.

The menus, and what happens when you open/close them, do belong to Firefox. Cocoa gives apps a fair amount of power here. In Firefox's case, the issue is likely because each window specifies its own independent set of menu bar menus - very un-macOS - and it handles that by destroying and recreating the global menu bar every time you switch windows. The stuck menu bug seems to happen when a window is opened or closed, so my guess would be that something about the destroy-and-recreate routine is broken on macOS 27.

"I have a folder open in the Dock. If I click on another folder, shouldn't that then open?" Yes, and it does.

Look at their gif carefully. Enable Dock magnification, click one folder, then click on any part of another folder's icon for which the click/cursor would no longer be on that folder's hitbox after the magnification effect moves to center that folder.

I've noticed some mini AI icon that's sometimes shows up when I select some text on Safari - I've no Siri enabled - and when I click on it nothing happens (when I'm able to click, I need to be fast like Sonic to catch it!!)

Upgraded and now audio won't play out of my HDMI monitor. I wouldn't think this would count as a very niche use case, but what do I know.

Promotion driven development. It was really good before, honestly.

happy i've waited

This, this this the gripe list for macOS 27? I guess I'll add on, then:

They've completely broken every experience around minimized windows:

- App Expose doesn't show minimized windows at all

- Cmd-` iterating doesn't iterate through minimized windows.

- I've had times where Cmd-`-ing to another Terminal yanked it from it's workspace onto my current one.

- It will just stop rendering the Mission Control thumbnails. 90% of the time it just shows empty workspaces

- It seems to be doing some stupid optimization where it blanks out my Firefox window until the workspace switch animation has fully finished. Likely it's part of how they finally removed the janky animations from the past 3 releases. But, COME ON Wayland can run on my 5 year old x86_64-linux laptop with perfect animations with none of this jank and compromise.

- It regularly doesn't change focus from Firefox (on my second workspace) to Firefox Nightly (on my first workspace), when swiping. Or even swiping and clicking. Only if you swipe, move the cursor and then click does focus shift to the open, top app on the workspace.

It's hot f****king garbage. Maybe this is my foot peddle but it breaks every basic way I do window management and use the OS.

Breaking minimized windows. Only Apple could manage that.

build integrations for developers who use them.

in practice, developers will not use them. they think they have better ideas and they don't care about platform or the user as an abstraction over the platform. they could use the existing thing.

it's the same mindset that has automakers not wanting to support CarPlay. they think they can do it better or just as well and it's completely missing the point: the user doesn't want to fuck with their custom one-off UI.

I’ve been having some weird issues since upgrading that I haven’t been able to pinpoint if it’s the apps or the OS.

New since upgrading:

- In telegram messages get stuck sending and the app has to be force quit - Discord doesn’t pick up audio device changes until the app is restarted - Soundsource has crashed a few times if I change my AirPods out. - Selecting a screenshot area is laggy when dragging the selection box

iOS 27 is in the same situation: a little bit less annoying than 26 overall but new bugs all over the place. If that is the Tim Cook farewell, it leaves a very bad impression.

Every year some crybaby have issues. The upgrade experience has been flawless for years without needing a full clean reinstall

These problems look to me like the result of writing N implementations of X, rather than 1 common X shared by all the apps.

In comparison to what? Windows, Linux.

Windows Vista. Is that you?

Can't they made this glaring oversight.

smdh

Only issue I've seen is search doesn't work in Settings.

Edit: 27.0.1 fixed that.

they're more interested in visual polish than day-to-day functionality.

Form over function has been the rotten core of Apple ever since it's lost a bite!

I haven't noticed any bugs yet. And I actually like Liquid Glass, cranked the transparency to the max. AMA.

Sequoia was the Snow Leopard of the 2020s. Going from that high to the lows of tahoe or golden gate is a real and jarring downgrade.

That used to be true - back when memory use mattered; before the code base grew to consume all available memory.

It’s been an improvement for me.

The mis-alignment trope is well established, be it in the corners or at the center, but there are bigger design sins:

- wastefully large "zero KB" text to signal nothing

- poor text legibility due too light of a gray color - if you don't want people to read that text, don't add it! Or hide behind some tooltip or something

- tiny font size with a lot of space wasted, that's bigger than small margins

- the useless brightness of persistent window controls, they are way too common and unimportant, especially for keyboard users that never even click on then

I know my machine's getting old, but does it really need a second to load in the Profiles menu when I open a new Firefox window?

I don't see how age matters here for such primitive low cost operations, so no, it should be instant on a machine older than yours

Sometimes the search bar in System Settings simply refuses to work.

This continues to be a very frequently highlighted epic fail across various Apple platforms. I wonder, is there any substantive explanation on why it's so bad for so long?

Perhaps there's hope yet. Snow Leopard had nearly two years of refinements to achieve the level of polish and stability its name has become synonymous with today.

Not really, it's more like it has years of memory loss leading to a bunch of bugs like in this blog to be forgotten and the marketing tag taken over. So definitely there is hope, just wait a decade...

slowness and the battery drain.

Isn’t that the index being re-built? That takes a bit of time after the upgrade, but other than that it really should not be slower or use more battery. My 15 certainly does not. Maybe try to get in touch with their support?

Papercuts, that's a neat way of describing them. Thanks for that!

Was it a poorly-authored PDF without fields? You’d be SOL entirely on Windows in that situation. I find Preview’s PDF editing pretty intuitive generally.

I also like that Preview gets page numbers right in complex documents like textbooks. If a problem set is on page 89 (which might be the 115th actual page), I can just go to it. I’ve yet to see any other free or built in PDF reader do that.

Also, employees do because it drives the promotion cycle.

where "nothing was off limits, no enhancement too small"

They could've shipped a smaller list of bug fixes by a given date rather than a bigger list of bugs

My understanding is that Apple has this culture of we must ship things by this date no matter what.

It used to be very different. Apple was known for missed OS deadlines. They were sometimes compared to Blizzard back in the day; now both of them lost their reputation for polished releases. The cycle was closer to 2 years and they promised several times a tighter release schedule before ending on a yearly cycle.

I don’t think one is necessarily better than the other. Back in the day it was frequent to have a major update fail in some way and require reinstalling from scratch (though loss of data was rare). Now that releases are not that different from their predecessor, it’s much smoother. Longer cycles meant that features took much longer to get into a release. And then major fixes took more time on top of that. Now they can iterate faster, which is both a blessing and a curse.

For those who complain that we are saddle with Liquid Glass for another 2 years while they tweak it, keep in mind that it took several 2-year long release cycles to get rid of pinstripes and brushed metal.

Still waiting for the release of AirPower, scheduled for release in 2018 following a 2017 announcement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPower_(Apple)

Apple used to do that and it didn't work. Once there was a guy named Steve, who had a lot of wise quotes; you can take them or leave them but "real artists ship" was a good one.

For a laugh, ask Siri AI “how do I contact Apple’s CEO?”

For a cry, ask it how to change the keyboard shortcut for activating Siri in Golden Gate.

Commonly held lore is that you do not install a macOS with a minor version of zero. That has been confirmed by shoddy first releases ever since there's a macOS X.

Wait for the next upgrade unless you're forced to go with the first release.

The quality of their software has been inversely proportional to earnings for a while now.

Bugs are elsewhere in the system, too. Sometimes the search bar in System Settings simply refuses to work.

Yep, I've run into this and issues where clicking the search results or normal sidebar items in settings do nothing. Even after killing and restarting Settings.

Golden Gate is better than Tahoe IMHO but only slightly. I hope they circle back to the myriad of bugs/UI issues they introduced.

I'm honestly very puzzled by all the positive comments I've seen about Golden Gate, it's strictly worse in my experience (i.e., I can't think of any old bugs that don't bother me anymore, but there are annoying new ones). For example, I can report the same menubar bug as the author: as I'm typing this very comment, my Firefox menubar has two menus permanently "selected" [0]. I use the Hiding option for the Dock, but ever since I upgraded the Dock randomly switches into an unhidden state (but it still thinks it's hidden, so I have to disable Hiding and then re-enable it to fix the behavior). I now have to semi-regularly `sudo killall coreaudiod` to fix the audio randomly cutting out on my AirPods (this would occasionally happen before, but it's gotten way more frequent). I'm left very unimpressed with whatever's going on at Apple.

I just checked and 27.0.1 is out, so here's hoping it fixes anything....

[0] https://imgur.com/a/5i5TlzQ

EDIT: Actually, one bug that I haven't noticed on Tahoe is the weird lack of vertical padding that some System Settings screens used to have. Credit where credit's due.

When using the Colours window, if you're the sort of person who uses its built-in eyedropper tool to choose a colour from the wheel (rather than simply clicking on it directly), then congratulations: doing that hangs the entire system

I always thought the eyedropper was so you could match color from an existing element. It never occurred to me to use it to use it in order to zoom in on the color wheel. Am I the only one who used it differently?

Where are the bugs that aren't just annoying UI/UX nitpicks that we can skip to hit the release date?

Golden Gate is one of the first MacOS releases with more of an enterprise focus. There's a lot under the hood that will be massive to support power users, IT admins, and the like. I'd save the complaints for massive failures in networking configuration or permissions management or anything like that, not button alignment.

Even correct bug reports are a drain on your engineers' time and attention.

Apple traditionally had a culture of a lot of high quality bug reports, but once those become too fast for anyone to keep in their head, there's no point to them because they'll just get lost. You might as well just go look for bugs if you run out of some. You'll find them.

These are pretty worthless critiques. In the grand scheme of things, they worked on items that actually matter as opposed to these minor things that no one will notice.

Abundance? Yes. Quality? No. I generated over 10,000 lines yesterday because "someone wants the whole thing done in a week." I did look at some of it. Real fast.

But we shouldn't be comparing to 26.

I’m usually upgrading my Mac OS major version around x.2.2

Anything prior to that is anything goes, in my experience.

I'm finding it quicker and more responsive than Tahoe, but I've run into a couple bugs that vex me. None are super troublesome, but I notice them.

The biggest one is that moving application stacks in Mission Control no longer works. In Tahoe and prior systems, if you invoked Mission Control with the "group windows by application" option turned on, windows belonging to a given app were "stacked" under an icon for that application.

This allows the user to move ALL of an app's windows from one display to another, or from one Space (Mac virtual desktop) to another, without having to drag them one at a time.

This broke in GG. I'm sure it'll get fixed in the .1 release, but it's annoying for now.

I think it also helps to remove the delay for showing the hidden Dock

  defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0 && defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.15 && killall Dock

I don't get it. We're 2-3 years into the widespread availability of LLMs and software quality, instead of improving, seems to be taking a nose-dive. This is the kind of dissonance between marketing and outcomes that's foundational to my skepticism about AI. Where is all the *good* software that AI is enabling?

This is AI at work

Is it safe to assume at this point that GNU and the kernel accept AI code but there is quality control compared to private companies ? What I am hearing (and what friends talk about) is that with AI everyone is hooked on quantity while quality has taken a back seat. I would assume that the quantity and features don't bother free software much so they can take their own sweet time with these things.

SL had plenty of UI updates.

Wonder how much of this is caused by SwiftUI

You can absolutely add it back using their toolbar customization tool. I added mine ages ago and it’s still present in macOS 27.

Take the QuickTime record button.

Arguably it’s visually centered, because the menu arrow on its right is changing the visual weight between left and right.

It may be a layout accident, but it might also be deliberate.

Apple positioned themselves as hardware company but continue to sell us ads and locked in software.

If they are open their platform wildly, the open source community will help, but Apple closes platform, close mind.

i have a 25% repro focus bug with Spotlight search on ipad when using a keyboard. trouble is, I've reported bugs to Apple, and it's a black hole. why bother?

This. I stopped reading about halfway through when I realized they were almost all minor nitpicks or personal opinions. The others seem to be corner or edge cases and judging by how nitpicky the author was with the others, probably required going out of one's way to reproduce.

In related news, Apple’s new CEO wants products launched faster while reducing headcount. That can only push quality in one direction.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/29/apple-to-launch-product...

When using the Colours window, if you're the sort of person who uses its built-in eyedropper tool to choose a colour from the wheel (rather than simply clicking on it directly), then congratulations: doing that hangs the entire system, and you've got no choice but to force a restart.

I cannot reproduce this on 27. I think writers should undertake some degree of wider research before making strong, universal claims.

They are vibecoding too much

For 99.9% of us, these mean nothing. This article is pretentious.

Classic Apple fans hyperfixating on things that do not matter. Misguided critiques like this are why Apple fans have such a bad reputation.