macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 2

Andrew Cunningham:

We are not highlighting this second round of developer betas because we think you should go out and install them on the Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches that you use daily. These are still early versions, and they’re likely to have significant performance, battery, and stability problems relative to the current publicly available versions of the software.

But generally speaking, these second developer builds are the first ones I install on my secondary test devices—a collection of mostly older devices that have been replaced but are still considered current enough to run the new update.

The official release notes don’t seem to say what’s new in beta 2. After day of waiting for Software Update to show the new build, I finally gave up and downloaded the full installer.

Michael Flarup (MacRumors):

We did it! New finder icon in Tahoe beta 2!

Zac Hall:

The issue? Finder has a dark side and a light side. The dark side is located on the left half of the face while the light side makes up the right half. Finder in macOS Tahoe 26 reversed this arrangement (while using an outline effect around the right side).

Juli Clover:

In macOS Tahoe Beta 2, Apple included a new option to add a background to the menu bar, making it possible to have a menu bar design that’s similar to the menu bar in macOS Sequoia.

John Siracusa:

Mmmmm…settings…

Joe Rossignol:

The second beta also gives a fresh coat of paint to the Migration Assistant app icon.

John Siracusa:

I think we need to talk about what has happened to Disk Utility.

Basic Apple Guy (Hacker News):

With this release being one of the most dramatic visual overhauls of macOS’s design, I wanted to begin a collection chronicling the evolution of the system icons over the years. I’ve been rolling these out on social media over the past week and will continue to add to and update this collection slowly over the summer.

Jack Wellborn:

Five thoughts on Tahoe’s Safari monstrosity that @siracusa shared via ATP show notes[…]

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I think the Journal app in macOS Tahoe is the first first-party Mac Catalyst app to rely on rich text editing, traditionally a pretty weak spot along Catalyst’s API surface (text editing and document management in general). Hopefully that kind of dogfooding will finally close that gap.

Previously:

• macOS Tahoe Beta Forces Sharing FileVault Key
• macOS Tahoe’s New Theming System
• macOS Tahoe 26 Announced
• Liquid Glass

Update (2025-06-25): Dan Counsell:

While the Finder icon is improved on beta 2 of Tahoe, I do still wish they’d gone with something closer to @flarup’s rendition of the icon 🥹

Dan Counsell:

And @louie made this version in Icon Composer that’s arguably even better, and honours the original 🥰

Stephen Hackett:

I know some folks (cough, cough, John Siracusa, cough) want Apple to go even further and make the lighter color on the right extend all the way to the edges of the the icon, which would look something like this very rough mockup I did in just a few minutes[…]

I can understand that, and the desire for the line between the two halves of the icon to be more rounded as it is in macOS Sequoia. However, Apple’s current Finder icon works well for me[…]

John Gruber (Mastodon):

The Tahoe beta 2 Finder icon is slightly better, but seeing it this way makes it obvious that the problem with the Tahoe Finder icon isn’t whether it’s dark/light or light/dark from left to right. It’s that with this Tahoe design it’s not 50/50. It’s the appliqué — the right side (the face in profile) looks like something stuck on top of a blue face tile. That’s not the Finder logo.

Louie Mantia:

As a person who used to make app icons at Apple, I don’t think the situation is that the designer doesn’t know, but rather the decision maker who is supposed to have taste doesn’t know. (If this person isn’t Alan Dye, then that’s even more embarrassing for him that he’s not the person making that call.)

Also, slightly purpler is better. More Mac, less Mail / Safari like I said before.

Rui Carmo:

Sometimes designers want to make their mark so bad on a project they go and gloss over either tradition, established branding or earlier styles that were there for a reason, and the updated Beta 2 icon still does not look like the Finder to me, even if I squint at it without glasses.

Riccardo Mori:

The new Migration Assistant icon is a fucking joke. Meaningless. Maybe it can work in an airport to mark an emergency exit or something.

The old one is so simple and clear. From an ‘old, now inactive’ system to a ‘fresh new one’. Migration, indeed. Right there.

Jonathan Wight:

Feels weird to see Apple tossing decades of beautiful iconography down the drain for what seems like… bad generic clip art.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Can of worms aside… I’ve been thinking it since WWDC, but Liquid Glass on macOS really feels broken without the fluid animations on iOS, much in the same way a screen without touch ‘feels broken’. So many more state changes in the OS seem like they need some kind of animation or transition, and the new design language asks questions of the Mac that it’s just not ready to answer.

Cabel Sasser:

i know this is nitpicky potatoes but this interaction between the macOS Tahoe Finder’s sidebar and status bar is truly wild.

it’s an extremely hard problem to solve! when you suddenly “float” a thing that has to sit directly next to lots of weird things

John Siracusa:

As requested by @rvr, here’s a control sample from Lion, the reimagined Lion by @realmacdan, Sequoia, and Tahoe beta 2.

Dave Nanian:

Using a custom NSSegmentedCell for an NSSegmentedControl on Tahoe, the overridden NSSegmentedCell methods are not called however, using they are called using the exact same code on Sequoia

Update (2025-06-26): Dave Nanian:

NSAlert constantly throwing constraint errors on Tahoe (FB18020308) is lots of fun[…]

Update (2025-06-27): Mario Guzmán:

I mean, just compare Music under Sequoia and Music in Tahoe. One is clearly easier to read than the other one. It is also far less distracting. I can tell you it isn’t Music under Tahoe.

[…]

I’ve been an iTunes user since 1.0 under Mac OS 9.x. This is the biggest UX regression in its entire 24 year history. Sigh. 😔

Pierre Igot:

[The Finder icon] might be better than in beta 1, but the edges now look fuzzy as hell… At this rate, we’re going to end up with macOS 26 “Cotton Ball” Tahoe. And everyone’s going to waste their time rubbing their eyes and cleaning their eye glasses all day long.

Norbert Heger:

What’s really great about these early Aqua designs (the buttons in particular) – they looked translucent without actually being translucent. So they looked cool and glassy but also had perfect legibility at the same time.

Gus Mueller:

The new Safari on Tahoe is so bad I’ve switch browsers for the first time in … fuck, when did Safari come out?

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Safari seems to be capable of viewing fewer and fewer sites, sans performance issues, with each OS release 😪 I feel like I’m back in the early 2000s.

It’s sad.

Update (2025-07-01): Mario Guzmán:

This is sort of what I was afraid of in #macOSTahoe. There are inconsistencies even with menu items consistent across all apps, like the About… menu item.

Some of Apple’s apps don’t have an icon. Some do, it is the “i” in a circle. Then you got Photos which luckily has a Photos icon in SF Symbols they can use.

Mario Guzmán:

Feels like the entire “design” of the new playback controls in Tahoe’s Music app are due to consequences of their new design. The lack of space & clarity turned everything into more clicks & barely visible controls/labels.

You now click to open the volume slider. But you hover to open the playback track slider. There’s an Action Menu (but you can only see it if you have Hawk eyes).

Track/playback timestamps are impossible to read. Pressing the Up Next button yeets everything off to the side.

Alexander Deplov:

The volume control covers up the other buttons, wow!

Joe Rosensteel:

One of my beefs with the Tahoe icons is that in many cases they reproduce simplified forms of existing icons in a glass material without considering what the result is communicating—absent knowing the lineage. The App Store is a series of haunted popsicle sticks because it used to be tools that formed the letter “A” for “App” the podcasts icon was a simplified form of a person with lines radiating outward indicating they were broadcasting so it becomes a series of overlapping circles as a lamp.

Michael Flarup:

How do you like your new trash can?

Brent Simmons:

I’m wondering what I’d have to reimplement in order to provide a setting in the Mac version of NetNewsWire to turn on/off Liquid Glass.

Adrian Schönig:

TIL that the “Here’s to the crazy ones” text disappeared from the TextEdit icon over 10 years ago. I thought it was still on there and was about to rant about it disappearing in Tahoe. Ah, well. That was such a nice touch.

Previously:

• Assorted Notes on Liquid Glass
• Roundrect Dictator

Update (2025-07-04): BasicAppleGuy:

macOS Icon History
Maps 🗺️

Dave Nanian:

Apple friends: we’re seeing a problem in Tahoe where if a Mac is in Dark Wake, and our schedule is set to run, we kind of start and then hang.

Update (2025-07-07): Manton Reece:

Minor nitpick in macOS Tahoe, the selected tab in Terminal is very subtle. Seems a usability step back from previous macOS releases. I might need to switch to a third-party terminal app again.

Marco Arment:

Honestly, this is making Terminal (and Safari) in Tahoe VERY hard for me to use.

Tabs in Tahoe are extremely difficult to distinguish from each other and from the active tab.

I’ve never switched away from Safari, and I’ve never investigated third-party terminal apps, but if this ships in the fall, I’ll most likely need to do both. And I really, really don’t want to.

Please, Apple, fix your design. Computers aren’t passive “content” viewers — they’re tools.

Jeff Johnson:

I opened Control Center on macOS Tahoe for the first time, and wow, most of the controls looked disabled.

Guy English:

MacOS 26 has exposed some manual retain release bullshit I’d skated by on for fifteen or so years? Pretty sure the thing blowing up used to be luckily in the same auto release pool as the thing it was calling removeObserver: on. Oops.

Alan Dye Catalyst (Marzipan) Control Center Finder Icon Composer Icons Journal Liquid Glass Mac macOS Beta macOS Tahoe 26 Memory Management Menu Bar Migration Assistant Music.app Safari Software Update Terminal

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