I've been running Tahoe since 26.2, after cowardly skipping 0 and 1.
And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path? Or are people just particularly confident about complaining about Tahoe after seeing everyone else do it.
For sure it has glitches, but as far as I can tell, they're the same glitches that were in Sequoia. (If anyone at Apple is reading this, can you take a glance at your NFS client code? It does like to just hang up occasionally.)
The only major complaint I have is the window resize target, which seems not to line up properly with the actual window corner, since they gave them Very Rounded Corners.
It's also a bit weird that the radius of the VRCs seems to change app to app.
But these are nits. I work on Tahoe every day and it seems fine.
I haven't ran into nearly as many bugs as I've seen from others, but there is definitely a performance hit for me. The UI in general feels sluggish compared to sequoia.
I have two M4 Pro's w/ 24GB of RAM (one work, one personal). Work is on Tahoe, personal on sequoia and there's a really noticeable difference in overall UI responsiveness. It becomes even more pronounced when I hook up to my external display (32" 4k).
In a way it reminds me of the olden days of running KDE or Compiz with every fancy effect enabled but on an underpowered GPU. Yeah, it technically works, but it's not necessarily a fluid or enjoyable experience.
I have my own other nitpicks about liquid glass & the design (there's tons of papercuts here), but that doesn't necessarily impact stability.
> And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path?
In my experience, the OS is as good as it's ever been. I've had to restart a Tahoe machine for something other than updates maybe once with macOS 26, and my main workstation is used 12+ hours/day.
In the HN Extended Universe, everyone using macOS has perpetually Had Enough and "begun to switch to Linux", while in the real world, Apple shipped 10%+ more Macs in 2025 than they did in 2024.
It has gotten a lot better since the betas/launch. The beta was _really_ bad.
I also don't have any real complaints about Tahoe. The new UI looks weird, but it's not the first time Apple changes things for the sake of changing things, and I eventually get used to the changes.
The worst macOS releases I remember were in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Back then, I often had to spend a day or two after each release fixing things the update had broken. At some point, I was using Ubuntu VMs on desktop extensively, as it felt more stable and polished for some kinds of work than macOS.
I almost always skip the .0 and .1 versions. In my experience, it's better to wait for a few months after a major release of any software and let early adopters deal with the issues.
Yes I agree.
I have an M1 Max like the author of this piece and recently upgraded. It's fine.
I don't like the look of it much and the drag targets are annoying but other than that it's been completely normal.
So are you saying the long list of bugs don't actually happen?
They definitely do. But in my experience they "accumulate".
Like, things all work pretty well at first. And then god only knows what happens as config and preference files get into weird states, and temp files accumulate and never get deleted, and cache files get stuck with old info and refuse to update, and god only knows.
So people with relatively new installations have a pretty good time, while people who have migrated their data across three MacBooks over ten years are encountering problems left and right.
I reinstalled Sequoia fresh last year because some mystery process would slowly consume 50GB of disk space over the course of every two weeks, no disk utility could locate any file responsible, but restarting reset it. But with the fresh reinstall, everything started working fine again. It's annoying. Then I upgraded to Tahoe and zero problems. But I'm sure they'll gradually start appearing over the next year or two.
Death by a thousand cuts.
Yes, things like small bugs and abnormal user experiences accumulate and over time the OS and other apps become inconsistent.
As heavy users who are generally by profession spend a lot more time with a Mac, they tend to experience more issues, and things that used to work for decades start to crumble. It all works if you’re acting like working on glass pieces, but that’s not what computers are made for.
You’re supposed to use it extensively and get more efficient over time without a glassy UI and other broken systems pulling you down at every turn.
It’s not about using a system for 10 minutes to visit a website with Chrome, but instead spending days programming things, having a normal life, and still having the very simple file discovery features working.
There’s no reason for a computer to be this choppy and slow (in things like context switching etc.) unless something else is going on in the background.
They happen but you learn to work around them and they fall into the noise.
FtFF has been a mantra for 20+ years; it’s never going to happen, stop trying to make it happen.
I have a dirty confession to make too: I’ve been running Tahoe and Windows 11 on my devices, and both are working fine for the most part. If I ever switch to Linux desktop, it will be mostly out of boredom.
I'm usually in linux on my (2019?) mbp but have had to use macos for some stuff lately (so I'm not exactly tuned in to it and using it hard all day), but I don't see what the problem is tbh and haven't run into anything slowing me down or inducing the rage that I read here.
This is normal. Don't engage in the rage.
This has also been my experience. I don't really have any problems with it. It works fine, it doesn't have the weird telemetry and monetization issues that Windows has.
> And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path? Or are people just particularly confident about complaining about Tahoe after seeing everyone else do it.
That's like asking whether Jackson Pollock or Thomas Kinkade is the better artist. There is no objective measure for it. Some people will have a strong preference, others won't have a preference at all. The designers who made the changes in Tahoe clearly thought the changes are improvements. A lot of macOS users disagree, but some macOS users don't have a preference.
I've only seen a performance hit in rendering all of the icons they have put throuhgout Tahoe and I have had dark mode on. My total experience is about the same and I do like I can color and change the icons easily like classic macOS. I do see the liquid glass changes as a bit weird and inconsistent and while that can be reverted I just got used to it.
There are lots of other regressive, mind-bogglingly inept changes scattered across the included applications.
One of my favorites is in Apple Music, where the transport controls and song-title display has been moved from the top of the window down into the content-browser or song-list area... where it's "transparent" and overlaid on other text or album art.
In Mail, the "get new mail" button has been REMOVED from the toolbar. WTF? WHY? So when you're awaiting the ever-more-widespread 2FA from something you just logged into, you get to dig through a menu to hurry up retrieval or re-add the button to the toolbar (which casual users are not going to know how to do).
The utter stupidity of these flailing, desperate changes should concern every computer user. Microsoft is lost, and Windows a clinic on dereliction, design incompetence, and hostility toward users. That leaves Mac OS as the only tolerable consumer computing platform... and it has taken a profound turn for the worse with Tahoe.
And all for nothing. Apple's blunders here don't make sense from any perspective.
In Mail, right click on the toolbar and choose customise. Put the "get mail" action where you want it.
Thanks. I noted in my comment the option to re-add it to the toolbar, but everyday users can't be expected to know this is possible or how to do it.
Nor should they have to, given that mail retrieval is something that everyone can logically be expected to do if they're told they were just sent a message.
No issues here either