macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 7
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:
Update (2025-08-19): BasicAppleGuy:
macOS Icon History
iWork Suite: Keynote, Pages, & Numbers
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.
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.
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.
Reading menus on macOS Tahoe is quite a rollercoaster ride now…
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…
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 🤷
peek text readability found in Settings, but really all over the #macOS 26 sidebar
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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[…]
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
John Siracusa's comment on how his SwiftUI layout is a movable feast reminded me why I didn't end up using any Forms when re-designing my app with SwiftUI:
https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/magic-lasso-redesigned/
On macOS, the behaviour of the forms was non-reliable, the design was ugly and it seemed to exemplify the worst of the macOS System Settings redesign.
May have missed a bullet, as it sounds like even with later iterations, it still has issues that haven't been properly tested or polished by Apple.
The similarity to Gnome iconography is one I've noticed. Compare the new Disk Utility icon to Disks.
> The new Installer icon…
I'm not sure who is to blame the most for this terrible icon:
- the "artist" who created the ridiculous new disk icon.
- the person/team who validated the squircle jail.
- the "artist" who created the Installer icon with the constraint of the squircle jail and the ridiculous new disk icon. It looks like the type of icon one would create to just point out how terrible the squircle jail and disk icon are.
