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.
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.
I've been running Golden Gate since the first beta was released in June. I've generally been very happy with it. I think it'll take a couple years to unwind the Alan Dye era, but Golden Gate is a significant improvement over macOS 26
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)
I don’t understand why System Settings search is such a dumpster fire. It’s up to a couple thousand (probably overestimating) fixed text labels. Even when it’s not bugging out, half or more of deeper labels simply can’t be found even if you enter the exact string. Who the hell thought this sorry ass search is okay to ship and keep it that way after this many years? I swear even Windows’ settings search is more capable.
they keep doing this, and everything gets worse for it; i remember when they rewrite mDNSResponder and internet connectivity went to hell... and the ux in system preferences is atrocious... just text labels and lists everywhere, no attention to detail.
the people who built/designed/managed the rollout osx and nextstep were a totally different breed imo
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.
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.
definitive proof that apple's engineers are using GNOME workstations internally: now MacOS system apps look like any software created using that garbage pile called libadwaita.
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.
This isn't a new bug, it was present in MacOS Tahoe, but what happened to the tabs in the Maps app? The View menu still has Show Tab Bar and Show All Tabs itms, but they are always greyed-out. Cmd-T doesn't open a new tab, as was the case before Tahoe. (I count this as a bug in that the UI seems inconsistent with the function.) If anyone knows how to regain access to tabs, I'd love to hear it.
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
I was chatting with a friend about the Decline and Fall of Apple over the weekend. We both miss Steve Jobs.
For all that Steve was batshit he was willing to do hard things that were "bad for business." I heard so many legendary stories over the years of Steve Jobs holding up releases at the last minute because they weren't up to par. That takes guts in a corporate environment where there is so much pressure to go along and say "well, we have to ship something." No, you don't have to ship something. You can take your time to do it right and ship things that are high quality.
Apple shouldn't assume that just because they are the incumbent that they will be around forever. Today's Steve Jobs could already be alive and plotting...
I doubt it. There's no engineer who is phoning it in with Claude without basic QA nor attention to detail nor adversarial review who was shipping great code beforehand. Nor do I think culpability works like "Claude did it".
Put Linux on the thing? I'm using an ancient MB Air with Debian, works just fine. Same for an ancient 27" iMac, also running Debian without any problems.
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.
Could be a long wait. Mail is the one app I care most about and it's been broken in different ways since Catalina, along with issues in Photos, Music, etc. Might as well go to Linux where it's at least possible to fix the high priority issues.
What gets me is people saying macOs 26 -> 27 is an improvement. Maybe so.
But Sequoia -> 26 -> 27 is still a noticeable downgrade.
So is it really an improvement: making something much worse and then slightly improving it?
Saying 27 is an improvement over 26 is a different statement to the one you’re making about the general trend of macOS.
Nor does it mean that people shouldn’t welcome improvements even if those improvements don’t bring the overall quality back to that of what it used to be.
But I do also agree with you that we shouldn’t be ignoring the fact that Apple have generally been on a downward spiral in terms of software quality for a number of years.
The problem with stating that 27 is an improvement over 26 is that it's ignoring the elephant in the room. It doesn't make any sense for the conversation to just stop there, and implicitly forgive all of the regressions 26 brought as water under the bridge. 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 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.
To me it basically feels the same as 26. All the "they're fixing Liquid Glass guys" hype turned out to be over a slider to control the transparency of the glass, when you could already set it to opaque (tinted) in 26. I guess it's an improvement for however many people were dying to have specifically 70% opaque Liquid Glass. If anything Golden Gate looks a little worse than Tahoe. They added a faux-3D effect to the Liquid Glass, which clashes with the flat design used on whatever part of the UI isn't Liquid Glass. It's as if you were using Windows 10, then got halfway through installing a Windows 7 theme before cancelling it, so random stuff is Aero vs. flat.
The biggest problem introduced in Tahoe was the massive padding areas around everything, which remain unchanged in Golden Gate. I've seen rumors that Apple is planning on a touchscreen Macbook, so maybe the massive padding is to make it so people will be able to use their fingers more easily. I guess they've decided to repeat the mistake Microsoft has made in Windows 8 and newer, where they destroy the UI for everyone in order to cater to whatever percentage of users prefer 2-in-1 convertible laptops.
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.
I bought a MBA in 2022 and haven't ever upgraded the OS. It works fine for me, and the AI stuff seemed like it wasn't ready for prime time. While it might have provided some benefits, I was concerned that there would be more unexpected downsides.
I'd be curious to know what people think about Siri AI and whether it's finally worthwhile. I'm still running an old iPhone with no AI, so don't have much basis for comparison.
I hope you have been installing security updates for the OS version you have. At some point, those end, and then you're looking at a different trade-off in not upgrading.
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[ 10.2 ms ] story [ 409 ms ] threadSafari Developer Tools freezes the app.
Even though I’ve disabled the Siri AI tools, they still show up everywhere for some reason.
The main menu bar sometimes gets darker.
Apple Mail keeps formatting my emails in ways I don’t like (bullet lists, etc.).
Apple Mail Smart Mailboxes are broken if you have multiple Macs.
The list goes on…
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.
It's just 26 but better. On my personal macbook I upgraded from 15 to 27 directly.
Same.
and 2027 was supposed to be a "Polishing" release.
When will we start seeing the benefits of all the smart AI shit?
the people who built/designed/managed the rollout osx and nextstep were a totally different breed imo
It’s time for some apple internal honesty about the state of MacOS gui.
They don't just mention one bug here.
Especially worrying is the last bug, which hangs the entire system.
For all that Steve was batshit he was willing to do hard things that were "bad for business." I heard so many legendary stories over the years of Steve Jobs holding up releases at the last minute because they weren't up to par. That takes guts in a corporate environment where there is so much pressure to go along and say "well, we have to ship something." No, you don't have to ship something. You can take your time to do it right and ship things that are high quality.
Apple shouldn't assume that just because they are the incumbent that they will be around forever. Today's Steve Jobs could already be alive and plotting...
I switched from Linux to macOS but the lack of QA is going to force me back to Linux once security updates stop for Sequoia.
Same. Will sell my Air when security updates stop for Sequoia
Nor does it mean that people shouldn’t welcome improvements even if those improvements don’t bring the overall quality back to that of what it used to be.
But I do also agree with you that we shouldn’t be ignoring the fact that Apple have generally been on a downward spiral in terms of software quality for a number of years.
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.
The biggest problem introduced in Tahoe was the massive padding areas around everything, which remain unchanged in Golden Gate. I've seen rumors that Apple is planning on a touchscreen Macbook, so maybe the massive padding is to make it so people will be able to use their fingers more easily. I guess they've decided to repeat the mistake Microsoft has made in Windows 8 and newer, where they destroy the UI for everyone in order to cater to whatever percentage of users prefer 2-in-1 convertible laptops.
I don't know if I'll ever upgrade to Golden Gate, and this blog post isn't giving me confidence.
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.
"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.
I'd be curious to know what people think about Siri AI and whether it's finally worthwhile. I'm still running an old iPhone with no AI, so don't have much basis for comparison.