macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 7

Juli Clover:

Apple today provided developers with the seventh beta of macOS Tahoe 26 for testing purposes, with the update coming a week after the sixth beta.

The release notes are still titled “beta 6” and don’t call out any changes since beta 5.

Xcode is still at beta 5.

Previously:

• macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 6
• Xcode 26 Beta 5

Update (2025-08-19): BasicAppleGuy:

macOS Icon History
iWork Suite: Keynote, Pages, & Numbers

Nikhil Nigade:

A quick tip when capturing #screenshots of your Mac app for promo material for #macOS26 Tahoe: DONT

Instead, do the following: Take a screen recording of your app’s window/s and then, pick a frame from that window.

Notice the difference. You get all the glass element refractions and specular highlights, especially on elements like the floating sidebar.

Adrian Schönig:

No improvements in beta 6 or beta 7 on the messed up order of queue entries. Please don’t tell me that Tahoe is going to ship with a broken #MusicKit.

Jonathan Wight:

This is my app launcher on Ubuntu. Honestly - ignoring the difference in aspect ratio…

I cannot tell the difference between most of these icons and macOS 26 icons. In fact - i think i prefer many of the Ubuntu icons.

A linux distribution now has iconography equal or better to Apple’s.

Norbert Heger:

Reading menus on macOS Tahoe is quite a rollercoaster ride now…

John Siracusa:

Behold, the state of SwiftUI layout in Tahoe beta 7! Watch the controls move on mouse-over! Watch the scroll bar disappear! […] This worked fine before Tahoe.)

Update (2025-08-20): Jonathan Wight:

The new Installer icon…

Marcin Krzyzanowski:

I join the @caseyliss “low contrast on macOS 26” war, as I installed the beta finally. All I see on my screen in white blob with some gray areas. everything is melted altogether. I’d like to learn what displays they use to design these at Apple. So far it doesn’t look good on my MacBook Air display, nor my Apple Display monitor 🤷

Marcin Krzyzanowski:

peek text readability found in Settings, but really all over the #macOS 26 sidebar

Ezekiel Elin:

I regret to inform you that in macOS Tahoe, typing into a contact card too fast still goes backwards[…]

Update (2025-08-21): Norbert Doerner:

To punish us for always wanting to see the scroll bars, they are now huge and fat in #macOS26 “Smear”.

Norbert Doerner:

They still have the option to “Show toolbar button shapes” in the still mostly unusable “System Settings”, which in the past had drawn a nice thin line around these to make them actually, I don’t know, like, VISIBLE to the user?

But the giant ugly blobs in macOS 26 “smear” that are supposed to be “toolbar buttons” cannot even do that anymore.

So this option is a NO-OP now and doesn’t change anything.

Pat Castaldo:

I’ve never downgraded a Mac OS in my life — I’ve stuck with every beta, kept moving everything “forward” — Tahoe is the biggest step back in usability I’ve ever experienced.

I just tried using it without Reduced Transparency enabled and I literally got queasy.

My M1 MacBook Air now feels slow as shit. At Beta 7, there’s no excuses left.

Louie Mantia:

I said this with beta 1: this is a 25 year old product. I get that there will be bugs, but you have all the time in the world to make this right. why would you ship anything before it’s ready? beta or not, there’s just never been a reasonable excuse for 15 or 20 years now. this is a mature product.

Oskar Groth:

I’ve uncovered the best new Liquid Glass style icons from the upcoming macOS Tahoe. Including some never-before-seen secret ones made by Apple designers.

Save this as inspiration for your next app icon[…]

Update (2025-08-26): Mario Alberto Guzmán:

As of #macOSTahoe Beta 7, these are still broken and I don’t feel confident that they will or even have any intentions to revert their change.

This isn’t something I can fix. From NSDistributedNotifications that my apps receive, the userInfo dictionary I am given used to have far more data than what I get now.

The data that is now being omitted helped my apps determine the player state and source.

BasicAppleGuy:

macOS Icon History
Address Book/Contacts

BasicAppleGuy:

Needs more wrench! 🔧

John Gruber (Mastodon, Hacker News):

I don’t think the old icons for these apps from MacOS 15 were particularly good — Apple has mostly lost its “icons look cool” game. But the new ones in MacOS 26 Tahoe are objectively terrible. The only one of this bunch that’s maybe sort of OK is Wireless Diagnostics. They all look like placeholder icons made by a developer who would be the first to admit that they’re not an artist. Disk Utility, which is an important app, doesn’t even look like it involves a disk.

[…]

AppleScript Utility — A fine concept for this icon (within the confines of the terrible wrench-and-bolt utility icon concept). Everyone who knows AppleScript knows the scroll that represents AppleScript scripts. So just put the iconic AppleScript scroll in the bolt in the wrench in the squircle. But here, the placement of the scroll is botched — it’s rotated a few degrees counterclockwise. It makes the scroll look like it’s falling over.

Update (2025-09-02): Rui Carmo:

There’s a degree of nostalgia, sure, but nobody on the planet can disagree that Apple’s current design team seems to have completely lost the plot where it regards both respecting the history of their operating systems and… well, just doing something that doesn’t look like it was phoned in.

I just don’t feel like Apple actually cares about the quality of their software experience any more, and am happier and happier that I’ve been running GNOME alongside as my possible future desktop.

Contacts Design Disk Utility Icons Linux Liquid Glass Mac macOS Beta macOS Tahoe 26 MusicKit Screenshots SwiftUI

3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon

---

---

---

Leave a Comment

Name

E-mail (will not be published)

Web site

Δ