Not sure I’m going to upgrade myself yet, but curious what others think:
- How are you finding it for dev?
- What are your thoughts of it generally?
Yes. Nothing broke, as far as I’ve seen.
Homebrew works. asdf works. Currently on elixir 1.18.4-otp-27 and erlang 27.3.4.3 and both are working.
edit: on a 2021 macbook pro with a m1 pro chip
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No issues so far. I’m running on a Mac Book Pro (m3)
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Glad it’s working well on a dev/technical level 
Just watched this video:
…and the general design looks really bad 
such a huge waste of space - are your Safari tool and tab bars as big as they are in the video? (The vid should play at the correct spot) If they are can you make them smaller?
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I can’t say anything about safari since firefox is my main browser. The new design hasn’t bothered me much except for the music app. They moved the play controls to the bottom for some reason(was up top before) and the transparency can sometimes make it hard to visually parse:
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That’s annoying. I always have Music open full screen on a separate space, and so the controls at the bottom also make it harder to get to if you need to click on a favourite playlist and then play (I put a . in front of them so they’re always at the top). I also frequently click on play for it to play my most recently added tracks and it usually (think it’s a bug) plays them on shuffle, so you have to instead click play on the most recently added track, click next (which makes it stop) then click play. Much easier to do that when the controls are at the top.
When playing tho I have a mini-player open on my desktop (Shift Command M) as I find that easier than using the main menu bar controls (plus you see album art/more controls) - so hopefully that’s unchanged.
There is one thing I have hated since they changed it - the keyboard controls no longer work exclusively for Apple Music. If you have a Safari tab open with a video then pressing play/stop confuses it and sometimes it will stop or play music and sometimes it will stop or play the video! I wish there was a way to lock the keyboard controls to just the Music app. (Also while on this topic, I don’t like how they’ve now moved the visual feedback for volume up/down to the top right of the screen - when tapping the volume controls on the keyboard it is much easier to look in the lower centre of the screen as that’s what’s closest to your keyboard!)
It seems to me it’s another step to frustrate monitor users… so they get a VisionPro. But maybe I am being too cynical! 
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There was an HN thread today (at least 1300 comments when I looked at it some 9 hours ago) where loads of people complained about Tahoe slowing their machines, even people with M3 Pro Macbooks.
I have not pulled the trigger on my aging Intel Mac (iMac Pro) yet but judging by iOS 26 on my iPhone 12 Pro Max, I am not an optimist. Safari became half-unusable, visual elements are appearing at the top of the page while you are scrolling down (visiting ElixirForum showed me that and gave me a good confusion), pages reload randomly, sometimes flat out disappear and you have to hard-reload, and those are only the first 3 I can think of now at 4:36 AM, there were even more.
TL;DR of mine and others’ impressions: Apple sole selling point is the polished software. Well, that seems to be gone now, further confirming my strategic decision to gradually move to Linux and take full control of all my computing.
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Yeah - I upgraded. We’re building a SwiftUI app that needs to support the new iOS version, and it forced my hand with the Mac (& iPhone). I have to say, some of the new UI elements on iOS are actually quite nice for our heavy industry focused mobile app, but could really do without the glassy effect (and yes, as Dimi says, Safari on iPhone is barely usable - e.g. now multiple non-obvious taps to change tabs. I use Firefox mostly on the iPhone now).
On the Mac the big round corners and massive title bars are a ridiculous waste of screen real estate and now the status bar on our web application gets partially chopped off by the rounding on Safari (it’s still ok on Chromium based browsers). Safari also seems to hang a lot more than it used to - I only have about 60 tabs open so don’t know what the problem could be 
. I also find I need to reboot a bit more often than I used to - still about 50x longer interval than Windows, but Macs used to go weeks or even months without the UI bogging down.
I also now have audio problems (I’m on an M1 MB Pro FWIW). It turns out this has been an ongoing problem across a few versions, but only manifested for me after the upgrade. Killing any “Intel” process seems to fix the audio, but the hilarious thing is that Xcode iPhone simulators have some old Intel binary that loads the simulators, so I can’t do video calls etc while Xcode is open, and it was Xcode compatibility that forced the upgrade in the first place.
Aside from that, yeah, it’s fine. Nothing else broke that I’m aware of. Elixir works fine - compile times seem to be marginally slower - hopefully 1.19 gets us back to where it was!! There don’t seem to be any additional security checks stopping me doing anything. Photos cropping is still as annoying as ever (why do I want to crop a landscape photo into portrait aspect ratio by default??). Preview has made it a bit more fiddly to pull up the editing tools. Settings is still sluggish and the Settings search interface has somehow gotten worse (really slow - sometimes 10-15 secs for me), but not totally broken. Spotlight is allegedly smarter, but they’ve increased the delay in updating the results to ensure you pick the wrong item every time instead of just now and then (has anyone ported XTreeGold to the Mac - that seemed to be the peak for file managers).
TLDR - it’s ok, you’ll still be able to function, but I won’t be buying any Apple shares on the back of it - it’s another small step in their general decline IMO. Linux is getting better and Mac is getting worse - I’m not sure where the cross-over point is, or if we’ve passed it for web devs, but I’m certainly keeping my options open for my daily driver (i.e. everything except building Xcode projects).
EDIT: Gee - I’m sounding like a cranky old man!
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I’ve been conversing with two LLMs about how to make a good hardened Linux setup and I am slowly collecting actionable info (read: exact software to install, exact configurations, exact boot settings etc). No promises as my career and health are crippling my time & energy & motivation to contribute to the IT area (and have done so for 6-7 years now) but I think I’ll gather up enough info to write a nice no-BS blog post about how to properly migrate to Linux without sacrificing [almost] anything.
Most of what I am interested in is giving any and all programs only the absolute bare minimum for them to function i.e. I don’t want Chrome to scan my $HOME dir; I’ll give it access only to whatever files it needs to maintain state and caches and experience severe schadenfreude when the monitoring service tells me it attempted to read somewhere where it should not – and that goes not only for Chrome but for everything.
But, too early for that. Just saying that using LLMs + common sense + some experience, one can start formulating a Linux setup. It’s not a trivial task but at one point one does reach the crossing point you alluded to. Mine is very close.
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That really does not surprise me - and what a huge shame/missed opportunity because this was an opportunity for them to show off the benefits of Apple silicon and why it was worth it. Not only did they not do that, but they’ve undone their marketing that Apple silicon was better/faster.
I honestly wouldn’t bother - my Intel Mac had become more and more unusable with each macOS update. For now I’d consider getting a cheap Mac mini and run it off an external thunderbolt SSD, then wait for Apple to get their act together - possibly around the M7/8.
Nightmare! I’ve finally got a monitor I love (a Dell Ultrawide) and everything just fits perfectly, but their Mattel re-design, with oversized everything (no doubt for VisionOS) is going to be incredibly wasteful and annoying.
The best thing everyone can do is:
- Keep complaining publicly
- Keep complaining via their Feedback app
The thing is, marginally slower with each incremental update will add up - this is what they do, introduce or contribute towards obsolescence with each update.
Why can’t they be like Elixir or Erlang (or most other programming languages) which get faster over time, not slower!
I do think public outcry works. I remember when Andy Hunt (PragProg) tweeted about how Apple were pushing away developers with stagnating and poor hardware releases… and then we saw the first improvement to MBP (the 16" model in 2019). Was it a coincidence? I think not tbh, developers are a key market not just because of the size (and the kind of machines they can afford) but how influential tech and creative people are when it comes to everyone else.
We should use that privileged position more often 
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I have to come back to eat my words…
The great thing about being able to run macOS off an external HD is you can load a fresh copy whenever you like, so that’s what I did, and… I actually quite like it! 
The corners and the tab bar are nowhere near as extreme as they look in that video! (At least not when running at my res.)
I haven’t tested performance or anything like that but in terms of the overall UI it seems nice on first glance. I will however probably wait a bit before upgrading - give them a chance to work on the bugs/performance.
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I try to stay away from the latest major OS X at release time from a few years now; let others be the beta-testers as somehow every major update seems to break something unexpected to users and Apple themselves.
Really wondering how KDE shaped up the last decade; was quite good 10 years ago so must be brilliant by now..right…right?
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Generously assuming that programmers are somehow higher beings not driven by ego and not over-focusing on shortsighted process that was obsolete 3 months after it was introduced (and that was 15 years ago).
Sadly most of us know this is not true. We are very, very far from higher beings. Add to that the open-source nature of such high-profile projects like KDE and you get a combination of (1) “it’s not a paid job, I’ll do what I want, frak you” and (2) “this has always worked good for us, thanks for your opinion but we are not changing our ways”.
gg ez wp.
I’ll pull the trigger on Tahoe soon though. I am between jobs currently and it’s a good time to iron out any kinks.
Why is Apple now failing at elementary stuff though, I don’t quite get. I mean I’ve seen organisational and managerial / executive failures many times in my career but I can’t quite reconcile those with the mountain of bugs and UX issues that Tahoe introduced.
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Simply: one has to come up with new ideas. But once you reached the very top, new ideas will simply be less.
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Apple is trying really hard at being special and unique again; but the competition closed the gap. Being less about Interaction Design and more about Visual Design doesn’t help either.
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See how Spotify keeps changing the UX of their music player; sometimes going back and forth with elements displayed. They seem to have reached the top and keep coming back to that element positioning; but also keep trying to bring ‘new’ stuff to keep the impression of ‘moving forward’ with ‘updates’ just to revert them again.
Can we blame them? I doubt it. After all people want to showoff they have the newest gadget (so design switches from curved to edgy and back), and you wont make headlines with spec bumps only (while that could be the best thing when you reached the top)
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See how some streamers find a new ‘best language’ every time and how the creators of these languages spread these streamers tweets like wildfire.
Result: streamers reach fans of Go, Rust, Haskell and Elixir. Just to repeat the sequence all over.
Doing something different generates attention. Doing the same thing does not.
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I’ve been bitten in the past myself, but this video is making me want to upgrade:
My Spotlight/search has been broken ever since I switched to Apple silicon, so I’m hoping Tahoe will fix it.
Same I think, see above^^ (That vid is worth a watch)
To be fair there are some nice editions in Taheo (at least as per that vid)
Heyyy yesterday I did run the command to disable it, clear cache and enable it again. Today I could find my installed apps. Didn’t know it was a common issue.
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They still pull some great innovations; but the shittification can be seen in parallel.
Doing the new glass thing is not because of great UX. Cool tech, looks nice (sometimes). It’s unique feature is best seen when using a magnified view. But IxD/UX wise it’s horrible and in a few years they will get rid of it; then solid is once again ‘new’ kid on the block.
How long before circular icons? Place your bets!
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There is one benefit to the new design that I have not seen mentioned anywhere - the additional padding around buttons is better for touch screens, so maybe they are working on a touch screen Mac…
macOS Tahoe is good at least for me, new design look clean & easy to get right actions than old version. Liquid glass design made me remember about material design of Google but better. I don’t see any break for my work flow (almost is coding).
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