macOS 26 Tahoe review: Power under glass
macOS 26 Tahoe is two things at once: It’s the broadest and most productivity-focused update for macOS in years, while also taking collateral damage from Apple’s broader design ambitions on its other platforms.
It features the biggest update to Spotlight ever, including direct access to app actions and Apple’s first-ever built-in clipboard manager. Shortcuts adds deep automation support and direct access to AI models, changing the game for many aspects of Mac automation productivity. These are features that will delight Mac users and help them work better.
Unfortunately, they’ll be productive while using a tweaked design that’s not nearly as prominent as it is on the iPhone and iPad, but still has to be labeled as a net loss for the Mac.
My eyes glaze over
I’ll cut to the chase: If you’re worried about upgrading to macOS 26 Tahoe because of Apple’s “liquid glass” design, don’t be—it’s mostly a minor reskinning that doesn’t really change how the Mac works, and after a few weeks, you mostly won’t notice it.
The Mac’s look has been updated to fit in with Apple’s new design, but it clearly wasn’t a major priority. Depending on how you feel about “liquid glass,” this could be a good thing—perhaps more focus on the Mac would’ve led to a messier and more disruptive design. It feels a bit like Apple has done just enough to claim that the Mac is a part of the liquid glass revolution, while not actually putting in all the work required on other platforms.
Yes, everywhere you look, there are toolbars with buttons that feature the rounded look of liquid glass. But on the Mac, they’re just lifeless, which is a shame, since toolbars are everywhere in macOS. The buttons on iOS and iPadOS animate when you touch them, quivering like a bowl of Jell-O. They’re translucent, so content slides under them, adding to the glassy effect.
In the Finder, for example, there’s basically none of that. In most places, the toolbars just look like flat light gray ovals separated from a featureless white or gray expanse by a generic drop shadow. Occasionally, when scrolling content underneath the toolbars, they do spring to life and seem to give off the effect Apple wants, but most Mac apps just don’t work that way, since the important content is in the window, not sliding through the toolbar.
Some of the aspects of the liquid glass design are pretty clever: In their ideal form, icons can be grouped in little bubbles that float above the interface, and can even animate as modes change. It’s not a bad idea, because having icons inside bubbles provides them with some depth that a purely flat design can’t offer. I don’t miss having a toolbar full of indifferent glyphs that might do something when I click on them, which has been the state of affairs on macOS for quite some time. In Safari, for example, I think the different collections of toolbar buttons look pretty good. (There’s still no animation to speak of, but maybe that’s all for the best?)
Where you most see the new design is, unsurprisingly, in cross-platform Apple apps like Music, Photos, Journal, Phone, and Messages. In Photos, for example, the top toolbar floats without any backing frame, meaning that the buttons all distort the underlying content as it slides by, giving a stronger feeling of them being made of glass. But of course, this approach also means that similarly-colored content sliding under a button can make it illegible. The system tries to maintain legibility by changing the color of the text or the opacity and brightness of the background item to compensate. It mostly succeeds, though changes in the appearance of the buttons can be distracting.
It’s clear that this design was created with specific kinds of apps in mind: iPhone apps full of scrolling content libraries that create the magical sensation that your content is sliding under Apple’s glass controls as you slide your finger on your phone. Unfortunately, the Mac is not the iPhone, and most Mac apps are not media library browsers. They’re often interfaces used to manipulate content and data, and those purposes are ill served by Apple’s design.
I also must point out the hypocrisy of Apple claiming that it’s humbly building a stage that’s a perfect setting for our content. That’s absolutely not what’s happening here: Apple repurposes our content as a decoration for its interfaces, using blurred and distorted versions of our images and words to show off fancy glass interface elements. Sometimes, it works: the feel of a canvas sliding under a bunch of glassy interface elements makes the whole thing feel like a harmonious whole. Other times, it feels like the interface and the content have both been obscured into unusability—and that’s bad.
In day-to-day use, the design issues don’t really affect how I use my Mac. I have found macOS Tahoe to be perfectly usable, and there are moments of beauty separated by long stretches of banality. I’m not sure whether I should be relieved that more of this design was not imported from other platforms, or disappointed that Apple has failed to properly include the Mac in its concept of what next-generation interfaces should look like. Maybe a bit of both.
The icon apocalypse ends in a squircle
In all the major 26-era operating systems, Apple is introducing a new icon design system that’s vector-based and allows icons to be recolored in various modes: default, dark, clear, and tinted. Moving to vectors is great for developers who previously had to render a zillion versions of their icons; the benefit to users is that those icons become more customizable based on your interface preferences. On iPhones and iPads, the “clear” icons really do look a bit like they’re made of glass, though I find their desaturation a little disconcerting. On the Mac, though, they really do just feel flat and colorless.
Unfortunately, Apple has decided to use this moment to unilaterally declare that all icons on the Mac should fit inside the standard square with rounded corners that defines every iPhone and iPad icon and has been adopted by numerous Mac developers as well. Icons of apps that don’t fit within Apple’s designated and approved rounded rectangle are forcibly shrunk down and placed inside a gray roundrect. Since many modern Mac icons attempt to put their own spin on Apple’s format by allowing small portions of their icon to peek out of Apple’s mandated borders, a lot of icons end up looking like boxes sitting atop boxes. It’s ugly and pointless. Developers shouldn’t be punished for adding a tiny bit of personality by painting outside the lines.
In Tahoe, Apple has decided to make folders fun by repurposing one of the Finder’s least-used features, tags. Tags are an organizational system that lets you apply little colored highlights or dots to individual files or folders in the Finder and then search for them. In macOS Tahoe, if you apply a tag to a folder, it doesn’t just get the little colored dot—the folder itself turns that color. You can also now assign a symbol or emoji to a folder, and it’ll appear on the folder icon. Fun!
People have been customizing their Macs for four decades, and for a while during the classic Mac OS era, you could use Labels to color folders, so it’s nice to see a return of this sort of feature. Unfortunately, it’s been shipped unfinished: You can tag files, too, but they don’t pick up color in any way. If you drag a folder into the Dock, it appears as a completely generic folder icon—no color, no symbol or emoji. There’s also no support for color if you drag a folder into the Finder’s sidebar. I don’t understand how you build a feature like this and then just ignore what folders look like in the Dock. What a waste.
A new direction for the menu bar
Ever since the very beginning, the menu bar has been a defining characteristic of the Mac interface. In macOS Tahoe, the menu bar has never been more flexible—or, strangely, more invisible.
Let’s start with the design: Apple has (once again) decided that the menu bar should be transparent. By default, the menu bar in Tahoe has no definition—it simply shows your wallpaper, with text and icons overlaid. It’s a place without being a place. There’s no there there. (This feels like a decision made by the same people who added the option for the menu bar to hide when you’re not using it, and created the iPad’s new optional drop-down menu bar.)
A menu bar with a transparent background would seem to be a readability nightmare, but I have to admit that after using it for a few weeks, I have never had any issues. macOS dynamically makes the text and icons white or black based on what’s behind, and I think it may also dim or brighten the background picture if it needs to provide a little more contrast. Whatever it’s doing, it’s been good enough for my use. My Mac feels a little more expansive and open without a solid bar at the top of the screen. (Fortunately, Apple has included a “Show menu bar background” setting if you’d prefer to define the geography of your Mac a bit more clearly.)
In other big menu bar news, after adding Control Center to the Mac in Big Sur, Apple has completely revamped that system in Tahoe. These changes suggest we’re entering a new era in terms of how items on the right side of the menu bar will look and function.
With Tahoe, Apple is adding the ability for third-party apps to create items in Control Center the same way they can on iOS and iPadOS. It has also put a Mac spin on the multi-page Control Center design of iOS and iPadOS: you can add custom pages of controls to the menu bar, each with its own icon. To do this, click Control Center and click Edit Controls. A plus symbol appears in the menu bar, and if you click on it, it’ll prompt you to choose an icon and then add controls. All controls can also be placed directly in the menu bar.
Put this all together, and it sure feels like Apple is building a new vision of how the menu bar works, with old-school Menu Extras joined by individual controls as well as user-created submenus full of controls. I don’t expect that Apple will deprecate the old-school Menu Extras approach to apps putting items in the menu bar any time soon, but it feels like the company is making its preference clear: that third-party apps should create Controls that can be run either in the menu bar or Control Center.
It makes a lot of sense, especially given how crowded the menu bar can get, especially on laptops with notched displays. There are a bunch of utilities such as Bartender that have long provided users with control over the menu bar, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most traditional menu bar items disappear in the next few years, replaced by Controls.
As a part of the revamping of Control Center, Apple is also changing the style of some of its heads-up visual alerts—for volume and brightness changes—which previously appeared dead center on the screen. Now, when you adjust your Mac’s volume or brightness, you’ll briefly see a Control appear just below the menu bar in the right corner, along with the particular menu bar icon that contains that control being highlighted. It’s a little disconcerting, as someone who has used OS X for 25 years, but I suppose I’ll get used to it.
Speaking of menu bar innovations, Apple has also extended its suite of Continuity features that allow events on your iPhone to appear on your Mac, with Live Activities. When a Live Activity spawns on an iPhone that’s nearby and linked to your Mac, the bit of it that would appear on the Dynamic Island also appears in your menu bar. And if you click, you’ll see the larger Live Activity widget that appears on the Lock Screen, or if you tap and hold on the Dynamic Island.
In Tahoe, I was able to see the San Francisco Giants score in my menu bar courtesy of the Apple Sports app. And when the score changed—a moment when a Live Activity will vibrate your phone or Apple Watch—the larger widget briefly expanded, indicating to me that something big had just happened. I really like this feature a lot, but I admit that it made me wonder what a Mac-specific Live Activity feature would look like. I know a lot of its functionality can be replicated by other means, but having a simple menu bar entry that could auto-expand when something important happened, using the same style as Live Activities, might be a nice thing for Apple to provide to Mac apps in the future.
All told, if you were worried that Apple making the menu bar transparent in Tahoe was a sign that it wants it to fade away, I have good news: Apple has actually been hard at work making the menu bar more interesting than it’s been in years.
Shortcuts gains automation powers and AI access
Shortcuts on the Mac now supports automations, a feature previously available only on iOS and iPadOS. As on those other platforms, you can now set Mac workflows to run at a particular time of day, in reaction to an alarm, when receiving an email or message, when connecting to specific Wi-Fi networks or Bluetooth devices, when connecting to a Display or activating Stage Manager, when opening or closing an app, at a certain battery threshold, when connected to power, and when activating or deactivating a Focus Mode.
Those all have their uses, but the Mac has some special automation types of its own: when a specific folder is modified, when a file is modified, or when an external drive (a specific one, or any!) connects or disconnects. This enables a bunch of new automation possibilities previously only supported on the Mac by an ancient feature called Folder Actions, which only a maniac would attempt to connect to Shortcuts. (Yes, you can also use a utility such as Hazel to automate many tasks involving changes to your Mac, but I am a fan of giving Mac users more power in the base operating system.)
The automation triggers are pretty broad. I have a longstanding automation that reprocesses Southwest Airlines calendar files that appear in my Downloads folder, which means I needed to set up an automation that triggers every single time any file is added to that very busy folder. It’s trivial to add a Filter Files block to weed out all files that don’t match my criteria, but I’m a little surprised that Apple hasn’t built those filters into the top-level trigger. Still, I was able to move my automation over from Hazel in a few minutes.
There’s an awful lot of opportunity for very simple automations that can change your Mac automatically when events occur. I wired up a workflow that toggles my Mac from light mode into dark mode to a specific focus mode in about 30 seconds. I should be able to run an automation that detects which desk I’m using and adjusts a bunch of settings accordingly.
Another huge leap forward for Shortcuts is the new Use Model action, which lets you tie in workflows to Apple’s on-device and Private Cloud Compute AI models, as well as ChatGPT itself. The Six Colors staff has already built several automations using this feature, and while the results can be somewhat random and take some effort to process, they can also enable the creation of workflows that were previously impossible using Apple’s existing tools. Shortcuts also now includes pre-baked Apple Intelligence features, like Writing Tools summaries.
Otherwise, the Shortcuts app doesn’t seem improved at all. This is unfortunate. This app is the core of automation across all of Apple’s platforms—and it should be adding new features that aid workflow builders. (Every time I realize I’m going to have to build a set of if/else-if tests in Shortcuts, I begin pondering using another tool instead.) Instead, it seems to be adrift.
Spotlight powers up and the clipboard travels in time
This year, Spotlight turns 20 years old. In the beginning, it was a simple search engine for files on your Mac, but over the years, Apple has upgraded it with various abilities, making it a quick app launcher, internet search engine, calculator, and dictionary, among other features.
But I have to say that this year’s Spotlight update is probably the most consequential of any of them. Back 20 years ago, LaunchBar was my go-to utility because it combined Spotlight’s features with dozens more. Over the years, as Spotlight has improved, I’ve invariably gone back to LaunchBar. So take this as the immense compliment it is: I may never go back to LaunchBar after using Spotlight in macOS Tahoe.
The new Spotlight goes beyond the single default search box, though it is still pretty effective in quickly finding a file or launching an app. Now there are four separate filters you can use for Spotlight: Apps, Files, Actions, and Clipboard. If you click on Apps (or type Command-1 after typing Command-Space), you’ll see a browsable list of apps (including iPhone apps, if you’re using iPhone Mirroring) that’s basically the replacement for the now-deprecated Launchpad. It also appears, standalone, as the new “Apps” app in the Applications folder.
Files (Command-2) will similarly let you search a filtered view of just files, and will offer some suggestions even if you don’t type anything, and provides a set of filters that let you focus on files that certain apps can open. For example, when I clicked on the BBEdit filter, I saw a bunch of recently edited text files on my Mac, including the one I used to write this story.
Actions (Command-3) offers a catalog of system and app actions, as well as Shortcuts workflows, that you can run directly from Spotlight. These are powered by Apple’s App Intents framework as well as a new “run from search” option in Spotlight. To run an action, select it and press Return, then use the tab key to move around and fill in the blanks. Apple suggests you use this for simple tasks like sending a quick email or text message, but as more apps (and Shortcuts workflows) appear, there’s an opportunity for this to become a really quick way to execute commands, entirely from the keyboard, without even needing to open the relevant app.
Clipboard (Command-4) is a bit different from the previous items, in that clipboard items don’t seem to show up in default searches. This is, instead, Apple’s attempt to add a clipboard manager to macOS for the very first time. When you copy something to the clipboard, it’s not discarded when you copy something else! Instead, it’s stored for up to eight hours and accessible from the Clipboard view in Spotlight. Just select an item from the history and it’ll be immediately placed on your clipboard or pasted right where you’re typing. Simply scroll back through time to find that thing you copied a few hours ago.
Clipboard managers have been around on the Mac for years, and Apple’s is pretty bare bones—but it’s still huge that the company has embraced this concept. And to be honest, Spotlight has all I need out of a clipboard manager. If you need more control over clipboard storage or want fancier features, there are plenty of apps like Pastebot out there that will always provide more functionality than what Apple does. My only personal issue with this feature is that it’s now two keystrokes away—something I solved by programming Keyboard Maestro to type Command-Space Command-4 every time I type my old LaunchBar clipboard history shortcut, Command-. (But really, Apple should probably let users wire all four of these filters to their own keyboard shortcuts.)
Spotlight remembers more than your clipboard, too. If you invoke Spotlight and press the up arrow, you can scroll backward through your previous Spotlight searches. This is a feature very much reminiscent of the command-line history in Terminal, and it’s a good one. Why reformulate that old query when you can just… press the arrow key a few times and get it back?
A new Quick Keys feature lets you assign actions to specific strings, to make them faster to access. It’s a great idea, but any item should be able to have keys assigned, not just Actions, and those assignments should work in the main Spotlight search area, too. Right now, it’s too limited, but it’s a good start.
There are also new “slash commands” that let you quickly filter searches. Type /pdf and then press return, and your search is automatically limited to PDFs. I got it to work with Word and text files, too. It’s a nice idea, but it needs to go further: I’ve got loads of Markdown files, disk images, and even zip archives on my Mac, and it won’t let me filter for them, but I can filter for Pages documents?
Apple says it has added the ability to search popular websites from Spotlight, which would be very useful since I used LaunchBar to quickly search Wikipedia, IMDB, and other sites directly. Unfortunately, searching for something by typing IMDB and pressing tab, then entering a search query… just opened that search query on YouTube in Safari. I expect better. Search results should appear in Spotlight, so I can choose a result and open it directly. And, yes, I’d like many more options.
Here’s a funny one: For years now, you’ve been able to type Command-? (which is technically Command-Shift-slash) to search the contents of the menus of the app you’re currently in. You can still do that, of course—and it works on the iPad now too!—but those menus are also searchable from a keyboard shortcut you might have more committed to muscle memory, namely Spotlight’s. In practice, it’s a lot messier to search in Spotlight, since it returns all sorts of results, but if you can never remember Command-?, you will be rewarded anyway.
Apple has also added a new API that will allow cloud storage platforms like Dropbox to offer their content directly in Spotlight, which might eliminate the current disparity I find when searching for content that’s on my Mac versus what’s in my Dropbox account. I look forward to testing this, if and when third-party file provider apps adopt this feature.
In short, this is a huge step forward for Spotlight. Yes, some rough edges need a little bit of refinement and attention, but after 20 years, Spotlight really has gone from being a simple search tool to a powerful utility to quickly access information and perform tasks.
Little changes everywhere
As always, there are lots of small updates and tweaks throughout the operating system. The Phone app comes to macOS for the first time in Tahoe, providing a locus for answering and placing calls via your associated iPhone. You could do that before, but those features never felt like they had a place to call their own on macOS, and now they do.
There are a few major Accessibility extensions. For years, I used my laptop on the bus commuting to and from San Francisco, or at least I’d use it as long as I could until I started to feel sick, closed the lid, and stared out the window. Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues, which it added to iOS last year, are now available on macOS as well. The feature puts little dots on your screen, and they use your laptop’s accelerometers to react to your motion. The dots move up and down when things are slowing down or speeding up, and pan right or left when you’re turning. The idea is that your inner ear has more visual feedback of your motion, so you’re less likely to feel queasy. It works for me!
People with vision issues will also be excited about the addition of the Magnifier app, which has been on iOS for a while. It might seem counterintuitive to use Magnifier with a Mac, but the use case is actually to use it with Continuity Camera. You can place an iPhone facing outward and then use your Mac to zoom in on what the iPhone sees, which can be great for people with vision limitations.
Another app making its debut on Mac (and iPad) is Journal, which Apple brought out only for iPhone in 2023. I have no idea why it took nearly two years for this app to make it to Apple’s other devices, but the iPad and Mac both seem like better devices for journaling than my iPhone! Apple has added some sharing features so that your Mac (and iPad) has access to some of the personal data that the iPhone uses to suggest journaling opportunities.
The Music app has gotten an interface overhaul, replacing the old playback controller at the top of the window, a part of the app since the earliest days of iTunes, with an iOS-style floating window at the bottom of the screen. The new controller feels cramped and can get partially obscured by content sliding behind it. Time information and scrubbing controls are hidden until you move the pointer over the interface, and the volume controls are hidden behind a button and require an extra click to use. I don’t like it.
Moving interaction items to the bottom of the screen has become a reflex for Apple, I guess, given that it places them within reach on iPhones. I don’t see how it helps on the Mac at all. Meanwhile, AirPlay playback is still pretty unreliable. I don’t know what’s going on in Music land, but as someone who uses the Mac Music app every single day, it doesn’t feel like progress.
Two steps forward, one step back
Don’t get distracted by all the talk about the new “liquid glass” design. Yes, macOS Tahoe looks a little bit different, but it works pretty much the same as ever, and the new design flourishes are not as dramatic as they are on Apple’s other platforms. I got used to most of it in less than a week.
What you should consider, though, are the ways that macOS Tahoe offers new power features for Mac users. The new Spotlight features, including clipboard history, are huge. Shortcuts automations and access to AI models open up all sorts of new possibilities. The new Control Center suggests that Apple has figured out how to embrace menu bar management for the first time. If you use an array of third-party utilities, you may be unmoved by all of those improvements, but I firmly believe that macOS is stronger when you don’t have to add on a bunch of extra stuff in order to get it to work the way a power user might want it to work.
I admit that it’s a little weird to have mixed feelings about macOS Tahoe. The features added to the operating system this year are a strong sign that there are people at Apple who really understand how people want to use the Mac to get things done. On its own, the situation would lead me to be quite encouraged. But the invasion of Apple’s new design system seems haphazardly and inconsistently implemented, not adding a whole lot and sometimes just making everything murky and confusing.
Back in the mid-2010s, it felt like the Mac was forgotten by Apple. Today, it feels like it’s being given a lot more attention—but maybe a little too much, in the wrong areas? It’s a weird time to be a Mac user, because the Mac truly is an adjunct to Apple’s major business of the iPhone—but it’s also the platform that Apple itself uses to build all of its other stuff, so there are no bigger Mac users than the rank and file at Apple.
I’m choosing to be positive here. macOS Tahoe is a great update for Mac productivity, the best in many years. As for the rest of it, I could take it or leave it—but I suppose all of us are obliged to take it.
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