macOS Tahoe 26 Announced
Apple (preview, Hacker News, Reddit):
With the new design, iconic elements of macOS will feel more expressive, delightful, and personal while remaining instantly familiar, including the desktop, Dock, in-app navigation, and toolbars. Users can further personalize the experience with an updated Control Center and new color options for folders, app icons, and widgets. Continuity gets even better with the Phone app arriving on Mac, so users can access familiar features from iPhone — including Recents, Contacts, and Voicemails — and new ones like Call Screening and Hold Assist. And with Live Activities from iPhone, users can stay on top of things happening in real time, like an upcoming flight, right on their Mac. Spotlight gets its biggest update ever, allowing users to now directly execute hundreds of actions — like sending an email or creating a note — and take advantage of all-new browsing experiences to get to content faster.
[…]
The Dock, sidebars, and toolbars have been refined, bringing greater focus to a user’s content. The menu bar is now completely transparent, making the display feel even larger. There are more ways to customize what controls appear in the menu bar and Control Center, along with how they’re laid out. The new design also unlocks more personalization on the Mac. App icons come to life in light or dark appearances, colorful new light and dark tints, as well as an elegant new clear look. Users can also change the colors of folders and add a symbol or emoji to give them a unique identity.
[…]
Spotlight, the central place to search for things on Mac, makes finding what users are looking for easier than ever, and provides users with all-new ways to take action. During a search, all results — including files, folders, events, apps, messages, and more — are now listed together and ranked intelligently based on relevance to the user. New filtering options rapidly narrow searches to exactly what a user is looking for, like PDFs or Mail messages. Spotlight can also surface results for documents stored on third-party cloud drives. And when a user doesn’t know exactly what they’re searching for, Spotlight’s new browse views make it easy to scan through their apps, files, clipboard history, and more.
Users can now take hundreds of actions directly from Spotlight — like sending an email, creating a note, or playing a podcast — without jumping between apps. Users can take actions from both Apple apps and apps built by developers, because any app can provide actions to Spotlight using the App Intents API. Users can also run shortcuts and perform actions from the menu bar in the app they’re currently working in, all without lifting their hands off the keyboard. Spotlight learns from users’ routines across the system and surfaces personalized actions, such as sending a message to a colleague a user regularly talks to. Additionally, Spotlight introduces quick keys, which are short strings of characters that get users right to the action they’re looking for.
It looks like there are some good features here, but I really don’t like the new design. Most of it just looks ugly, particularly the toolbars and sidebars. You can still turn off much of the transparency (including the menu bar) with the accessibility setting, and this also makes the sidebars look better, but none of the settings seem to get rid of the huge shadows in the toolbars. The alerts are kind of a mess with a mix of different font sizes and a left-aligned layout that I guess is better than the narrow, iOS-inspired one, but I prefer the classic, wider design.
So is it macOS Tahoe, macOS 26, or macOS Tahoe 26, or macOS 26 Tahoe?
How do I install the macOS Taco beta on an empty APFS volume? Can I do that through Software Update?
I don’t see it in
softwareupdate --list-full-installers
Mr. Macintosh has a link to the full installer. There’s no IPSW yet.
• • •
I guess the terrible Settings.app style UI is now the standard we should expect across macOS.
It was nice having dedicated desktop UI designs for a while. I guess now macOS lives on iOS and iPadOS leftovers?
The menu bar is now completely transparent. ARRGGGHHHH
Why is a completely transparent menu bar good on macOS? Didn’t we try this before 10-20 years ago and then dialed it back a lot again? Why would it work this time?
Why would you want this transparency???
And why are there icons for every built-in menu item?
It’s impossible to read the title of that Acorn window. In the keynote. We’re not even in the real world yet. They made macOS horrendous.
• • •
The (apparent) fixing of Spotlight and effective return of Quicksilver almost two decades later and in almost every respect including parameters and menu navigation. This is a huge win for power users and a long-overdue update to the macOS experience. That it took Apple this long to do it is a bit sad, but at least they appear to be doing it right.
Ok, using Spotlight to search through the menu items of an app (like the Help menu did for ages) is a great idea!
The Spotlight Command Line seems cool.
OK I’m calling it, built-in clipboard history is the official WWDC winner feature.
• • •
I feel like we just need to rip off the bandaid and go back to wide alerts. Stacking the image on top of the text isn’t helping here. (I’m not picking on the checkbox misalignment in since this is a beta.)
Ok these “Thing is running in the background, is that OK?” alerts in macOS Tahoe absolutely need to go lol
• • •
On macOS Tahoe notarized apps are exempt from a first launch malware scan, making the launch incredibly fast 🚀
Odd decision. Apple has been notarizing malware ever since notarizing became a thing.
I hope Apple at least gives an option to re-enable that safety feature (even if it’s just via a Terminal command) for users who want a more hardened macOS.
• • •
In #macOSTahoe, if your Mac app icons stick out of the squircle, they’re now put inside a gray squircle for you. You can no longer have elements stick out.
Truly the end of an era where you could have free-shaped icons. :(
I will miss having icons in the macOS dock that break out of the squircle though.
They still made the Mac feel special and distinct.
I really liked that, too, and I’m not happy about having to redo my icons again, after Apple specifically allowed this style before (and did it with their own apps).
• • •
New Finder icon: 🤮
Stephen Hackett (Hacker News):
Something jumped out at me in the macOS Tahoe segment of the WWDC keynote today: the Finder icon is reversed.
[…]
The Finder logo has changed over the years, but the dark side has been on the left forever.
I’m obviously joking about this being the biggest news of the day, but it really does feel just plain wrong to swap the dark/light sides. The Finder icon is more than an icon, it’s a logo, a brand.
Previously:
- Ending macOS Intel Support
- WWDC 2025 Keynote
- Liquid Glass
- macOS 15 Sequoia Announced
- Command Bars
- Wider Alerts on Monterey and Big Sur
- Big Sur’s Sidebar Translucency
- Big Sur’s Gray Menu Keyboard Shortcuts
- Big Sur Application Icons
- More Big Sur UI Refinements
- Big Sur’s Transparent Menu Bar
- Visual Comparison of macOS Catalina and Big Sur
- Big Sur’s Narrow Alerts
Update (2025-06-11): Tim Hardwick (ArsTechnica, MacStories, 9to5Mac):
Apple has announced macOS Tahoe 26 at WWDC 2025, introducing a striking visual redesign alongside expanded Apple Intelligence capabilities and new Continuity features that further integrate Mac and iPhone workflows.
Although those Intel models will be able to use many of the new features in Tahoe, they continue to be unable to access any Apple Intelligence.
This means that Tahoe will continue to be a large Universal binary, and could in theory be supported by OCLP, although that’s likely to be more challenging.
macOS Tahoe does away with the Launchpad feature that’s designed to show you all of the apps on your Mac, instead replacing it with a new “Applications” interface that’s similar to the App Library on the iPhone and iPad.
Apple today announced the biggest-ever update to Spotlight in macOS, introducing context-aware actions, app integration via App Intents, and powerful new productivity features.
Now in the hands of developers, macOS Tahoe introduces a long list of new features – some were showcased at Apple’s WWDC keynote, while others were quietly added behind the scenes. We’ve rounded up a selection of smaller but still useful changes you’ll find in the update.
• • •
Big year for universal apps; Apple didn’t mention it, but the new Journal, Phone, and upgraded FaceTime apps in macOS 26 are all Mac Catalyst.
I’m not the only one questioning the continued value of tailoring my Mac Catalyst UIs to the Mac — Apple has thrown out its own NSToolbars too. It’s getting really hard to tell where the UIKit ends and the AppKit begins, throughout the OS.
The macOS and iPadOS system apps are so similar now in 26, it starts to raise the ugly question yet again of… why are you writing all this stuff twice?
Why are there two apps with completely different codebases that look the same and have basically the same functions, all over the OS. And why do you need four versions of a declarative framework to paper over the platform differences when there no longer are any meaningful platform differences? 😅
• • •
Yet seven years later at WWDC 2025, Apple’s plans appear more transparent than ever (yes, that’s a pun about Liquid Glass): the critics were correct that iOS and macOS are merging. The latest evidence of this merger is the appearance of app icons in the macOS 26 Tahoe developer beta. All Mac app icons are now forced into iOS-style squircles. This change affects not only Apple’s own apps but also third-party apps; if an app icon is not already a squircle, macOS automatically draws it inside a gray squircle.
John Siracusa calls this Squircle Jail.
The most bizarre phenomenon on Tahoe, though, is that newer app icons are automatically applied to older apps.
We’re gonna miss breaking out of the box on macOS. All app icons will be the same squircle, and any app without updated resources gets put in a grey penalty box.
And yes… Apple will mess with your squircle icon for your Mac apps… I did not have this lighting effect around the top before.
Hot take on the macOS icons becoming full squircle
I really love Mac icons. I was super bummed when they all became circles. I thought the icon overflowing the squircle was at least a decent compromise.
But after working on a few apps that run on both iOS and Mac? I get it. It’s an annoying speed bump and the icon systems were completely different requiring completely different assets. Especially if you were doing modern iOS icons.
I can only imagine how much it annoyed less Mac focused devs.
• • •
Finder evolution 1996-2025
Looks like Finder isn’t the only Mac application to see big icon changes in macOS Tahoe. Poor Otto had his arms, legs, and pipe taken away[…]
When I was designing the icon for iPhoto Library Manager (with the awesome @Iconfactory), which was inspired by the original Automator icon, the initial drafts had the robot looking straight toward the “camera”. Everyone I showed it to universally deemed it “creepy af”. As a result, both iPLM and PowerPhotos have the robot looking off center. Did Apple show this to any human beings?
The new Tahoe app icons are awful.
Here’s Preview.
QuickTime Player
TextEdit
Automator is just fucking scary.
[…]
Disk Utility
Many Tahoe icons look blurry to me. Am I the only one?
• • •
It occurs to me that Liquid Glass will make Electron apps on the Mac look far more different from native apps than they currently do — seems like it would be very difficult, to the point of not worth trying, to replicate LG in Electron.
So Apple has officially moved to left-aligned titles in titlebars. I don’t think they considered this would look awful (or broken) in About windows. lol
The transparency of the share sheet in Safari is ridiculous.
Why would anyone want this???
Notifications on Tahoe are FAR less legible if there’s anything behind them. (Sequoia version shown for comparison.)
(There appear to be no other UI changes to Mac notifications, so they remain clunky and finicky, too.)
On macOS 26, high-contrast Settings and Finder (column mode)[…]
It really is hard to believe that someone is so blind to the evils of translucency that they have chosen THIS picture as a good example of what it brings to macOS.
I mean, the Forward and Backward buttons actually look like two buttons in two different states! That’s EXACTLY what makes translucency evil from a usability perspective.
Is this… a toolbar?
The toolbar icons feel like they’re on a different plane from everything else. They visibly sit in front of window content and headings. Apple said this redesign was about focus, minimising distraction and UI getting out of the way of content. Elements like this, over the top transparency and refraction do the precise opposite. It’s like they had a brief and they have the buzzwords but the Apple execs haven’t seen or understood the implementation.
The toolbar on Tahoe is just weird. it does weird things.
And all the content i can see below it just darkens and muddies the toolbar.
“sooty” or “dirty” is the only way to explain it. This is not usable content and it’s not attractive UI. It’s just mud.
Some of the weird behaviour bugs can be fixed of course but the liquid glass mud effect will be permanent and i’ll have to opt out of the default behaviour to make my toolbar at all usable.
The corner radius of every window on Tahoe. Ugh.
macOS 26 installed. Good grief. Finder is hideous at this point. The rounded windows are almost comical. But the worst bit is window toolbar buttons, which have an insane drop shadow that makes them the most visually prominent part of any window. Background windows look weird too, with odd shapes. I found you can at least bring back a menu bar background by turning off transparency (which is how I have my iMac).
Lots and lots of work to do. This cannot be how this will ship, otherwise YIKES.
I do NOT like the menu bar changes on macOS. They feel like they’re spilling outside the window
Now that Apple has blurred the lines even more when it comes to layouts, such as no longer having a concrete divider between sidebars and the details view… interactions as simple as widening the sidebar now produce odd and unexpected behavior. Behavior that you wouldn’t get if you just had a hard line between the sidebar and the details view.
This is most noticeable in Music.
What is wrong with compartmentalization in layouts, Apple?!
Some of the Small and Mini controls in AppKit have been made taller in #macOSTahoe which unfortunately make Xcode 26 a bit more annoying to use on 14" MacBook Pros. The UI is bigger and bolder which means less space for your code editor. I have both sidebars as thin as they can be without collapsing.
The Mac was always great (before) because it embraced UI density.
I want to make my pixels work for me -- not the white space you think the app should have.
Wait, they’ve updated the mouse cursor! In macOS!
This is the first time they’ve changed it since the Retina transition in 2018, or arguably since the first Mac OS X itself, 24 years ago. Dang!
I really want to believe Apple is still going to improve the macOS liquid glass UI a lot before shipping. Because I installed the beta and it looks even worse than it seemed on the keynote. The sidebar looks like another window, and is much more prominent than the window content, and those toolbars are god damn awful. I see round rects everywhere not just distracting me from the content, but it’s even hard to tell windows and window sections apart. What a mess.
Update (2025-06-12): Mario Guzmán:
I knew there was something oddly familiar about the new Finder. I’m sure this was not intentional but the flattened the forehead and mouth parts so they reminded me a lot about the icons in Users & Groups in System 7-Mac OS 8/9-ish time frames.
I don’t like the new Finder icon, but not for reasons you’d think. It’s a decent, modern interpretation.
I haven’t liked the Finder since 2014 when they gave it the brighter colors in OS X Yosemite. It just didn’t feel like Finder anymore.
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Apple killed Launchpad and replaced it with Applications. This is as unuseful as the App Library in iOS, forcing users into Apple's automatic categorization instead of allowing custom organization. Is there still time to convince Apple to keep Launchpad?
I like a lot of the new *features* across the various OSes, but the UI changes are terrible.
It's like this is all designed for the TikTok generation. We have no HIG anymore. Nobody in charge cares. Lowest common denominator.
@Kyle... speaking of the terrible Settings.app UI, have you checked out Xcode 26? At least on macOS 15 (I won't be installing macOS 26 until sometime in... 2026) you have a search bar. Oh, and deleting derived data moved again.
Gruber:
> The Finder icon is more than an icon, it’s a logo, a brand.
Yes, but this whole redesign, intended for gen z, is a spit in design norms anyway. I bet someone did this on purpose and felt good with themselves, a real rebel, a true visionary. 🙄
14 years are going to like and think it looks futuristic. Older people are going to complain that they can’t read anything
And icon symbols for every action in menu is unnecessary but it doesn’t bother me as a user I guess. As a developer however it’s kind of a chore because now it feels like I have to try to either find an appropriate icon for my custom actions or make one/get one made
I don't think the reversed colors are the problem. It makes more sense with the reversed colors. However, the new design, with the blue piece of glass replacing the divider line down the middle, just looks worse and less elegant than the previous one.
Not a big fan of the LaunchPad going away. It's quite inconvenient that you can't get immediately the list of applications. It's a regression for standard users.
Not a big fan that the shortcuts (e.g. cmd - 1 does work with the numeric keypad on extended keyboard). That's the first thing I tried.
Not a big fan of the new system application icons. They basically are worse than the previous ones which were terrible compared to the legacy ones. e.g. the FontBook app.
Don't understand the look of the small switchboxes.
Small icons everywhere in menus, why?
So the general UI theme is Windows Vista and the menus are from Google Docs.
Cupertino, start your photocopiers.
The good thing with Alan Dye's tenure is that there are no surprises, each new iteration is a regression.
@Objc4Life Yes, it’s a chore to come up with all these icon symbols. But, also, even with Apple’s apps, not all the menu items have symbols, which makes the titles no longer line up.
And what is with being able to search an application’s menu items via Spotlight? They’re touting this as a new feature, but this has always been available in the Help menu — which seems like the most appropriate location for such a feature.
At this point they’re just rearranging the deck chairs. New Finder icon is beyond ugly and unbalanced, aside from swapping the colors. Does nobody at Apple have taste?
Old not supported Mac icons can be restored in the dock in runtime with this line of code:
NSApplication.shared.applicationIconImage = NSImage(named: "NiceIcon")
This works, which proves that there is no technical reason for Apple to end support for freeform icons.
> They’re touting this as a new feature, but this has always been available in the Help menu — which seems like the most appropriate location for such a feature.
Not always. It's quite recent relatively to the age of Mac OS X. So it's neither new nor old.
When it comes to half truths, I watched the interview of the Apple SVPs from the WSJ and it's a good thing that there are studies that say that eyes looking to the upper right is not scientifically demonstrated to be an indicator of someone lying. Because the SVP of software is surely looking into that direction all the time he's trying to explain that the Apple Intelligence fiasco is not a fiasco.
> Not always. It's quite recent relatively to the age of Mac OS X. So it's neither new nor old.
18 years isn't old?
"It's quite recent relatively to the age of Mac OS X"
It was added in 10.5, as far as I know. This came out in 2007. The first version of OS X was released in 2001. We had 7 years without that feature and 18 years with it.
Including pre-X releases, we've had 23 years of Macs without menu search, and 18 with it, so even compared to the age of the Mac, it's not that recent.
I wanted to like the new design and give it a chance, but Liquid Glass makes very little sense on Mac, and I’d argue it only really suits media where translucent overlays are normal.
On the Mac, it appears bland and ugly, gets in the way, and exhibits some seriously wrong thinking. Most baffling is the undue prominence given to the sidebar. By raising it, it looms over everything else, making the content feel secondary.
A similar problem afflicts the toolbar. Whether you see the buttons as glassy distorted blobs over scrolled content or fat, ugly circles floating above a plain background, they cast shadows on the content below. They’re a terrible fit for Mac apps predominantly concerned with things like text and detailed lists.
The new alerts are bland and ugly too. With no icon, they’re like something you’d see on a half-assed web page. Truly, there was nothing wrong with original design that served us so well for decades.
You’d think Apple would remember what was good about Aqua and avoid the pitfalls. Sure, Aqua was overdone at first, but it was visually appealing and always made sense. Liquid Glass is an ugly mess.
I'll admit that the liquid glass fixes one aspect of Big Sur through Sequoia's design that I hated, which is that they made so many buttons and other interactable UI elements have no border, or worse, have no indication whatsoever that you can interact with them.
The brilliance of 10.9 and earlier was that there always just enough skeuomorphism (if not too much of it) so that buttons popped out of the screen, using not just borders but light and shadow to make them appear as something protruding and pressable. Because our eyes have evolved to instantly and effortlessly recognize shape based off of how light hits it, it allowed us to instantly recognize what was what in the UI without requiring any conscious thought.
Now granted, liquid glass is *not* as good as macOS 10.6 - 10.9, which is around when OS X's UI peaked. But it does address this one issue. I like that things are back to being more three dimensional.
That said...
Everything else about it is garbage. The lack of legibility, there being WAY too much visual complexity, making the menu bar full transparent, getting rid of all unique shapes in app icons... the list of grievances goes on and on. And it's still the same basic layout as Big Sur with all of its defects, design flaws, and regressions since 10.15.
And on top of all that... my initial attempt to install Tahoe failed because the completely empty APFS partition with 1.2 TB of free space apparently didn't have enough free space to install the system. Just ridiculous.
I'm sticking with macOS 13 as long as I possibly can. It's already bad enough. I wish I was still running 10.13.
