macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 4
Apple today provided developers with the fourth beta of macOS Tahoe 26 for testing purposes, with the update coming two weeks after the third beta.
This update did correctly install for me via Software Update.
The only beta 4 item that I see in the releases notes is that it says Xcode Previews will “frequently panic” so you should use beta 3 instead.
You can barely tell that Continue is a button.
See also his screenshots of Safari private windows, menu backgrounds, and sidebars.
I love not being able to read the now playing track info.
Is there some kind of contest within Apple to see how little contrast can be used while still technically indicating a selection? One of these disks is selected, believe it or not!
Previously:
Update (2025-07-23): John Gruber:
There is no good argument for selection states that are anything but instantly obvious. Whoever designed this doesn’t use the app.
That playback bar though is wild
Tahoe beta dislike I haven’t others complain about yet: the difference in look between the active window and all the inactive ones is way too subtle. I repeatedly have looked at one of my windows, pressed command-w and end up closing the wrong window. Will file a FB because easy enough and don’t need a sample app. Previous OS versions had a much more pronounced shadow + more obvious titlebar changes between active/inactive.
I think the Big Sur change for active windows was a regression, and Tahoe makes it worse.
But, still, who steps back from updating a PDF document viewer in which each page is cut off at the corners and thinks yes, this is an improvement? I repeat: a selfish design choice prioritizing Apple’s goals over that of its users.
I think one reason Liquid Glass is causing such a profoundly negative reaction is that it is making a lot of people realize that the idea that they own their computer was actually an illusion. There was a sense that by choosing the Mac and local native apps you were shielding yourself from the "rent everything own nothing" remote worldview, but the inevitability of this coming disaster reveals just how little agency you really have over "your computer.”
Increasingly, the computer feels less like "your house,” and more like being a a senior in high school living in an increasingly tense environment with your parents. You're 17 but they tell you to keep the door open. You want to tell them why you're frustrated in good faith, but they know they're in the power position and just tell you "my house my rules.” It exhausting because there's nowhere else to go, and you're still expected to be productive in this environment.
On macOS especially, some of the new component designs are just baffling, like how sidebars look, how buttons take up so much more room and float for no purpose, etc. This is just a giant, nearly always ugly mess. Apple desperately needs new software design leadership.
Hard drives get perspective, time machine volumes dont…
[…]
It feels like the Time Machine icon is bulging out at the top.
Update (2025-07-25): Juli Clover:
The first Tahoe public beta is identical to the fourth developer beta that was released on Tuesday.
The new design on the Mac doesn’t feel light and glassy, as it does on iPhone and iPad. It’s just a bit of a muddle. I keep noticing how terrible toolbars look in macOS Tahoe, and toolbars are everywhere on the Mac. Apple’s stated design philosophy is to build interfaces that allow content to flow behind them, showing through (a glass, darkly?). The official line is that this makes more space for your content—but, of course, sometimes using computer software means using interfaces to manipulate content and data and other stuff, and it feels like Apple has lost its balance in a quixotic attempt to make every app look like a photo editor.
I also have to point out the hypocrisy of Apple claiming that it’s building better frames for its users’ content. That’s not what’s happening here: Apple is using our content as decoration for its interfaces, using blurred and distorted versions of our images and words to show off those 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.
[…]
But in most contexts on the macOS Tahoe beta, these bubbles don’t look like glass. They look like flat light gray ovals separated from a featureless gray expanse by an amateurish drop shadow. Occasionally, when scrolling content underneath the toolbars, they do spring to life and seem to give off the effect Apple wants, but of course, many (most?) Mac apps just don’t work that way, since the important content is in the window, not sliding through the toolbar.
[…]
After a month using early builds of macOS Tahoe full time, I can confidently report that this is an upgrade that feels like an upgrade. The additional power of Spotlight and Shortcuts is going to delight a lot of longtime Mac users, and I’m really liking the direction Apple is taking Control Center in the menu bar.
He thinks Squircle Jail should be removed before Tahoe is released.
I can’t stop thinking about how in an “adapt your app icons for Liquid Glass” session video from WWDC, the designer said that we no longer have to spend all that time rendering complicated effects in Photoshop (I like doing that!) or making different app icon sizes (I also like doing that!)
It was ridiculous to say. App icons on macOS 26 don’t have hinted sizes, so Apple’s own 16pt app icons look like ass.
See also: Andrew Cunningham’s review.
Previously:
Update (2025-07-28): new-to-reddit-accoun:
There is a bug whereby upon the system rebooting after installing Beta 4, you see the WiFi selection window during set up. When you select your network, it will just keep spinning. Rebooting does not work.
Apparently the issue is that if there were open windows before it rebooted, it will run into this issue and you will get stuck.
2000s Apple: Make the UI and the user content distinct from each other.
2013 Apple: Recede the UI and elevate the user user content.
2025 Apple: Fuck it all, just blend the two and fuck them if they can’t read the UI.
Oh Podcasts… what did they do to you? I shouldn’t be able to get the app into a state like this.
Compose icon button opens a new chat instantly. Video icon button opens a classic menu. Plus icon button opens a menu with bigger, colorful icons. Emoji icon button opens a popover.
All of them do entirely different things, in different styles, and there’s no indication which one will perform an action immediately, which one (if any) will have a confirmation, or which one will open a menu.
So, here’s the top of Apple’s own News app, in the public beta. What control is what, do you think?
Gotta say, though, you can certainly focus on the content, since you can’t see the controls! So, designers doing this…mission accomplished?
I may not ever recover from the collapsed state of the sidebar in Messages looking so bad with the inset sidebar and the alignment of the stoplight controls. It is so obviously awful. They could make the sidebar narrower to make the stoplight controls centered, but then the sidebar is reacting to the design decisions of the sidebar inset and spacing instead of how wide it should be without considering those things.
Update (2025-07-29): BasicAppleGuy:
macOS Tahoe Beta 1 → 4 icon changes
Update (2025-07-30): John Voorhees:
I generally like this interpretation of Liquid Glass on the Mac. It feels more vibrant and has a freshness I enjoy that retains the legibility of text in a way iOS 26 doesn’t. There are edge cases where icons and text beneath a translucent window can generate a smudgy effect that doesn’t look nice, but by and large, it’s a workable design.
If that were the whole story of Liquid Glass on the Mac, I’d say it accomplishes Apple’s stated goal of focusing on a window’s content by differentiating elements like the toolbar and sidebar. However, there’s more to Liquid Glass than that.
If you look at the newest apps coming to macOS Tahoe, like Games and Journal, you’ll find the same glassier look found in iOS 26. Buttons are transparent and shaped to distort content beneath them, leading to some of the same legibility issues as iOS.
He also has a thorough review of the new features.
Update (2025-07-31): samuelaweeks:
I can tolerate Liquid Glass, no compact tabs on Safari, and most of the other changes in Tahoe. But this [corner radius] is just unforgivable, doesn’t serve any purpose whatsoever and looks awful in the bottom corners of the screen.
Update (2025-08-01): Benjamin Mayo:
The new design (which includes the Liquid Glass materials and other design changes, like moving search bars to the bottom of the screen on iPhone) is a letdown on macOS. It’s ungainly and reeks of lowest common denominator thinking, rather than designing something specifically for the desktop experience.
[…]
The toolbars might be the worst part. As well as looking a bit ugly, I don’t understand the metaphor they are going for. The drop shadows on the buttons are so harsh, they are almost overpowering. The window sidebars also have heavy shadows. I think the sidebar is meant to be layered above the toolbar, but the shadows are illogical and make it appear like the buttons are floating atop.
The Liquid Glass material is carefully crafted to shine through the content that it is underneath, but this doesn’t really translate to Mac toolbar items, as so many Mac apps use ‘hard’ scroll edge dividers. This means most toolbars simply have solid white backgrounds. The end result is grey button platters sitting on a grey background. Most windows in Mac apps have a toolbar, so this mildly repulsive construction is pervasive across the system. Even when you do find a toolbar with a soft edge, that allows for colourful content to flow behind it, the glass refractions somehow just look worse than they do on iPhone and iPad, punctuated by the unrefined nature of the drop shadows that accompany the elements.
macOS Icon History Automator 🤖
Did they really try to give Automator’s face concentricity?!
AKA The bidet icon.
An icon you can’t recognize at a glance isn’t an icon.
Update (2025-08-05): Juli Clover:
We’re on the fourth developer beta and first public beta of macOS Tahoe, which means we’re getting closer to the launch version that’s set to come out in September. With macOS Tahoe now available to the public, we thought it would be a good time to share an initial review of the update.
I am sure this is a bug or oversight and not an actual design decision here…
But now that you can apply a tint color to glass buttons in the toolbar, if you do, their contrast with the glyph is so bad when the window is backgrounded.
I honestly thought the checkbox button was missing in this macOS Tahoe screenshot[…]
Trick question, is this Tahoe slider enabled or disabled?
Answer: Either. It draws exactly the same either way.
macOS Icon History
Disk Utility
Because Liquid Glass on macOS 26 makes everything use much more space, and thus, makes for bigger touch targets, it’s clear the next MacBooks Pro will have touch screens.
Somehow making the non-content stuff bigger helps prioritize the content.
If you thought the Tahoe Disk Utility icon was bad
Look at what they did to Directory Utility
I think the Mac HIG used to tell you that the toolbar in a Mac window is static and shouldn’t change or add/remove items as you navigate around the app. With macOS 26, that definitely appears to no longer be the case. Apple’s media apps, Music, Podcasts, Books and TV, and Photos, all treat the toolbar as something that can change per view or per tab, something you tend to see more on iOS
Despite all these changes I am making for #macOSTahoe, I’m still able to easily support back to macOS 13.0 Ventura. It’s sorta fun how different it all looks now… still not liking Tahoe though. Too busy.
I don’t care that it looks “cool” -- “cool” doesn’t help with usability. It should be an organic side-effect, not the driving factor.
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I usually try to leave more substantive comments but these all look fucking awful. Even for a beta.
I'm starting to think Liquid Ass is a deliberately tanked feature designed to take public attention off how far Apple is behind on AI.
Public sentiment around Apple software is now dominated by a "controversial interface" rather than "non-existent AI".
And this is the fourth Beta. And all the linked screenshots reveal that the situation is far from improved. If we're generous and estimate that Mac OS 26 will be released in the second half of October, this leaves Apple about 10 weeks to fix this UI. Good luck with that.
@Hammer
Regarding the absence of slop I'd consider that a feature, not a bug. Whatever the reason.
I doubt it's malice of any sorts. Where did the competency go though?
> I think the Big Sur change for active windows was a regression, and Tahoe makes it worse.
Part of it I think is that we're Old™ and spent so much time using title bars that (generally) got darker when they became active, whereas now it's the opposite.
Of course, brushed metal existed for a while, and that barely had any indication of focus. But even with brushed metal, at least we still had the default scrollbars which were visible by default and helped indicate focus by only displaying color for the active window.
All these years into the new design, I still regularly make mistakes when determining which window is active. Having more contrast between active and inactive windows would likely help re-train my brain.
Re "a lot of people realize that the idea that they own their computer was actually an illusion"
It's surprising to me that it's taken people this long to realize it, and some still haven't.
When was the last time you actually felt like your computer running macOS was truly *yours*? For me I'd say back in 10.13. And even then I had to go out of my way to keep Apple out of places it didn't belong.
But one of the worst aspects of modern computing is the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Google, or really any of the big tech companies changing the design of everything out from under you, whether you want it or not. There's no recourse. You can't keep effectively using an Apple device without updating -- Apple sees to that. Nor can you prevent a web service from changing its design to something worse, and it's always worse. I didn't want to upgrade to Big Sur's shitty redesign that made everything worse, but I had no choice because I need to run modern software on my computer for my job. I'm going to hold out on Liquid Glass for as long as I possibly can.
And as an aside, one of the side effects of this that really grinds at me is all of the people on reddit and elsewhere saying "You have to update!! Otherwise your system is vulnerable! The vulnerabilities!!!" and then can't conceive of any reason anyone might not want to update. In fact they react with intense hostility the moment you point out that updating has any issues at all. Even worse if you point out that a) fully patched mac systems are still vulnerability given all of the 0-days that get revealed, b) most malware just waits for you to enter your admin password anyway, and c) competent users can run unpatched systems securely, mainly by not being dumb and not downloading malware.
@Hammer @Torrington You're both right.
I have no doubt that one of the main reasons for this redesign is to distract from last year's debacle and have something flashy to show at WWDC. Aside from Liquid Glass, there were very few actual updates that they talked about.
I don't think they did a bad job on purpose, though. They did succeed in changing the conversation, just not the way they intended.
But they did release this and apparently expected a positive reception, when it is obviously poorly thought out and in need of much more refinement in the most charitable interpretation. That is almost as worrying as them doing a bad job on purpose.
In fact it genuinely makes me and apparently many others wonder if the executives that signed off on this actually use a computer themselves. I don't think I have ever seen Tim Cook anywhere near a functioning Mac even in publicity shots. It's always an iPhone.
