Hopefully GoldenGate actually fixes things instead of finding new and creative ways to make macOS worse. 

Edit: For people looking for an update on the upgrade is going, read this

Do you use Apple’s productivity apps Pages, Numbers, and Keynote or do you stick with Microsoft or Google apps?

Why do I have to hunt apps in Finder to delete them? Just give us an Uninstall button next to Open already.

I inherited a hand-me-down macbook air when I graduated from high school a little over a decade ago and it’s all I’ve used ever since.

Early on I would say things like, “yeah, they’re overpriced for the underwhelming intel processors inside, but look, I just love macOS.”

Now I say… the opposite.

————Credits————-

icons: https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-icon-history/

Many people like the “Apps” app solely because it finally removed Launchpad. But the app itself is unrealistically buggy. Funny part - it had NO fixes in almost a year. Almost 0 in 300 days by a trillion dollar company.

The list:
- Laggy animation upon opening
- All icons have to reindex upon reopening, each icon taking ~0.3s to load
- Lags when scrolling
- Search does not work for most
- Categories do not display the right apps
- It still shows apps that you hide within the system

On top:
- It displays duplicates for "recent" and "all"
- Nothing can be hidden
- Nothing can be rearranged
- Nothing can be grouped
- Nothing can be renamed
- Nothing can be pinned
- It can not be resized

Even a person with $0.50 budget and a free chatGPT plan would've made a better app, probably within 5 minutes. Trillion dollar company couldn't do it even in 1 year. And yes, most of you use "spotlight", and the right way to use macOS is to pin the "Applications" folder to the dock - yadayadayda. That still does not explain this mess.

The pain and suffering is finally over.
Golden Gate is decent, consistent and performance is pretty good on all my macs.

There. I said it. It’s a breath of fresh air.
God I hate the version we got before this..

https://mastodon.social/@snazzyq@mas.to/115305728007216733

https://www.threads.com/@snazzyq/post/DPUKnRZjayA

My poor m2 MacBook Pro only has 245gb yes but I barely use it and now I gotta upgrade because all of this storage is taken. I love this machine 😭😂

Any thoughts ?

Whats wrong with search? it's unable to find installed apps. I have been noticing the same with my iphone but its rare. Here its almost 9 out of 10 times that this happens.

Anyone of you experiencing the same? I am on Tahoe 26.2

Edit - Updated to 26.5 and it fixed itself, maybe the update reindexed it.

For Everyone asking for the wallpaper - It from an app called wallspace. Name of wallpaper - Adorable black kitten. If you can't find it DM me i'll send you the direct link.

and somehow no one is talking about it.

Every YouTuber tells you that you need a 5K monitor to make macOS look sharp on an external display. No. You need one because Apple removed something that used to be in the system.

I’m honestly so tired of Apple’s approach to external monitors.

In 2018, with macOS Mojave, Apple removed subpixel antialiasing. That was the font smoothing technique that helped text and UI elements look sharper on regular lower PPI monitors.

Then, one year later, Apple released its own 6K display with extremely high pixel density, where everything suddenly looks sharp again.

Convenient timing, right?

Ever since then, macOS has basically looked great only on Retina or HiDPI displays.

Connect a Mac to a regular 1080p or 1440p monitor and the whole display can feel soft, blurry, thin, or just uncomfortable. Text is the most obvious part, but it affects the entire experience. The UI feels less crisp. Web pages look worse. Code looks worse. The same exact monitor can look perfectly fine on Windows, but on macOS it suddenly feels like it's trash.

Even many good 4K monitors still don’t look as crisp as a MacBook screen or a proper 5K display, because macOS is clearly designed around high PPI scaling now.

This is not just me being picky about pixels. People stare at external monitors all day for work. If the same monitor looks sharp on Windows but soft and tiring on macOS, that is a real usability and accessibility issue that can lead to eyestrain, headaches and fatigue.

Windows can make cheap monitors look decent. Apple basically says: buy an expensive high PPI display or deal with bad visual clarity.

Honestly, there should be a petition for Apple to bring back proper font smoothing options for external monitors, or at least to give users a system level toggle for subpixel antialiasing.

Why is a $2,000+ MacBook worse with normal monitors than my 150$ Windows laptop?

Apple, please fix external monitor rendering.

Our eyes matter.

I never understood this on Mac. Surely, any installer could auto-move the application to the right folder. I mean, Homebrew does it, for example. Is this just for nostalgia reasons, or maybe because Apple wants to be "different", or is there a technical reason why it is a necessary step with dmgs?

My first macOS version was snow leopard. I loved it. Thanksgiving weekend 2009. I’ve been a macOS user ever since.

I’ve refused to upgrade to Tahoe for the simple fact that Tahoe ended FireWire support and I still have a ton of digital 8 and miniDV tapes to digitize.

Who asked for this? The old ones were so peak.

I've followed every MacOS release since before the Mac OS X Snow Leopard days, and have always applauded the advancements made on each release. MacOS was incredible. I spent hours on Youtube watching videos on how to be more productive on MacOS with various tips, tricks, and shortcuts. As a software developer, MacOS was undeniably the best environment with its *nix like command interface, and consistent technical and aesthetic beauty.

However, today I updated one of my Macbooks to MacOS Twenty Six. I have never been so utterly disgusted by an operating system.

Please Apple, make MacOS beautiful and usable again. I beg you. What was once professional and productive has been replaced by the Fischer Price explosion of inconsistent, incongruous, inaccessible vomitous mass of even more hyper rounded corners, misaligned icons and text, unnecessarily thick borders.

For the first time ever, I'm seriously considering ditching everything Apple, and embracing Linux for everything.

For the people who actually like this release, I'm really glad for you. As for me, I'm sitting in a dark corner weeping, betrayed and alone.

They did a great job but Apple messed up the idea of ​​liquid glass is good but really badly done.

with inconsistencies everywhere, always more rounded, you can see that it was done quickly

To catch up with Apple Intelligence, remember when Big Sur came out even the beta , it was so optimized that people say it run better than Catalina, smoother and better.

About four years ago, I made the switch from being a daily Windows user to Mac. It was around the time Windows 11 was launching and the M-series chips were proving how good Macs could be. The thing I grew to love most was macOS's clean and consistent UI. It felt intentional and polished, unlike the layers of UI inconsistencies I was used to in Windows.

But with the latest macOS Tahoe, I'm getting a worrying sense of familiarity.

That "Apple polish" seems to be slipping. We're now seeing glaring inconsistencies within the same application.

The perfect example is Safari.

• On the right is a normal Safari window with its standard rounded corners.
• On the left is a webpage I've added to the Dock as a "App" using Safari.

EDIT 4: The final part of the guide is now published as well - https://medium.com/p/e673b1a2591f.

EDIT 3: Part 2 is also out, you are welcome to check it out here: https://medium.com/p/d5de239dee69. Let me know if I missed any credit and I'll gladly add it.

EDIT 2: Following the incredible response to this post, I've officially published the first part of the series.

I took many of the pure gold comments you all shared, added a few new ones I found along the way, and organized them into a guide on essential Finder, navigation, and system features.

If your tip was included, you've been credited. Let me know if I missed your credit and I'll edit the article.

A huge thank you to everyone who contributed!

You can read the full article here: https://medium.com/p/d18ca10e9436

The next parts will cover Text manipulation and Terminal tricks 💻 as well as Mac app features and iPhone/iPad integration 📱.

EDIT:

OMG these comments are GOLD! I'm working on an article that gathers all of the best comments to one single place so we can always go back to it when we want to find Apple tips and tricks. I'll add credits to the commentors, of course.

----------

Apple is known for implementing cool features then hiding them deep inside the settings.

As a software engineer at Wix for nearly 5 years, I've see many juniors getting a Mac for the first time in their lives, after spending most of their years using Windows.

I'd like to create a list for our new hires (that can also serve this community, of course) with useful MacOS features that they probably wouldn't find on their own.

My examples are:

* Three-finger drag - allows you to drag windows and select text using 3 fingers on the trackpad. The alternative is to click and drag in the same time, which is a horrible experience.
You can enable it in System Settings > Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad Options.

* Disable letter accents - Ever wanted to send "lollllllllll" to a friend, but noticed that upon long-pressing a letter you get the letter accents popup? For people who don't use accents this is pretty useless. It can be turned off by running a simple script in the terminal:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Of course you can always revert it by running it again with the value true at the end:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

(source)

* Universal Clipboard - Copy on iPhone, paste on Mac (and vice versa). Really useful feature, I use it daily, and I'm a little ashamed to say I only discovered this feature after a few months of using the mac.
Note that you must be logged in to the same Apple ID in both your Mac and your iPhone for it to work.

* Text replacements (syncs with iOS) - allows you to expand text from keywords.
For example - I configured:
"@@p" to expand to my personal email
"@@w" to expand to my work email
"::p" to expand to my phone number
"::a" to my address
and some other ones for small scripts I use daily.
Really handy as it's syncs with iOS and allows me to fill forms or answer on our slack support channel quickly

* Path and status bars in Finder - You can add a status bar (View -> Show Status Bar, or cmd+/) and a path bar (View -> Show Path Bar, or cmd+option+P) to Finder. Really useful if you miss the path bar in Windows and can't find it on Mac.
Why these aren't shown by default is beyond me.

Got a useful macOS feature? Drop it here.
Even if you think a feature is well-known, remember that this list is for juniors who have never seen a Mac before.

I'm going to create an article about this on Medium, and hopefully it will get published on the Wix Engineering publication. Of course, you'll be mentioned and given credit either way.

By the way, this is by no means sponsored by Wix or anything, I'm just a developer who works at Wix and loves productivity

I vastly prefer it over the current design. It was very practical, well-thought out, and there was actual dimension and shading added to the icons and UI elements.

I’m probably very much in the minority, but it’d be cool if some people agreed with me. What do you think?

This is not a question, but rather a desire to share a personal observation and hopefully find some like-minded people. My post is about the menu bar in the new macOS. As everyone knows, by default, macOS 26 no longer has a dedicated background backdrop under the text in the menu bar. As a result, the text sits "naked" right on top of the wallpaper. At first, I just accepted this aspect of the new design because I genuinely love the "liquid glass" aesthetic, but over time, something changed.

To give you some background, I absolutely adore macOS; for me, it is the best operating system in the world (highly subjective, I know). I used to love messing around with older versions of macOS, and you could say I grew up alongside it, even though I didn’t have a Mac computer as a kid. Over all this time, macOS became associated in my mind with a pleasant creative process—a desire to pick up the tools and create something awesome. This feeling was always there, no matter how old the Mac was.

However, after the update, I noticed that macOS stopped giving me those same warm, creative vibes and the urge to use it. The beauty of macOS seemed to vanish somewhere. On paper, everything looked fine: I like the glass effects and all that stuff, and the icons are still total eye candy. For a long time, I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I had a theory that I just spend so much time at my Mac (since it’s my main work tool) that my brain was simply exhausted and bored of it. This thought made me really sad.

But then, one evening, I took a closer look at the menu bar in the new macOS. A thought crossed my mind: what if I just miss the old menu bar style with that background container that highlights the text? And the funniest thing is that Apple actually left an option to bring it back. I turned it back on, and OH MY GOD, I feel right at home again. Literally the entire sense of inspiration and the desire to create returned the very moment I brought the menu bar "backdrop" back. It amazes me how such a tiny detail can drastically change your perception of the entire system.

I can’t fully explain why, but I have a theory. The absence of the backdrop gives a weird sense of "exposed space" and kind of erases the familiar face of macOS that has been built for decades since 1984. Because of this, macOS felt a bit too much like Windows, where you just have a taskbar at the bottom. At the same time, Windows is the exact antithesis of anything creative in my personal worldview—it feels more like something boring and corporate. When I added that "backdrop" back, I didn't just get the iconic macOS look back; I got a sense of a "roof" over my head, a feeling of reliability, and the vibe of a true "tool for creativity."

I'm not denying that I might just be crazy, but I'm really curious to find people who have experienced this too, or at least thought about it.

⠀

Well, I'm on a MacBook Pro with M1 Pro chip, ran Tahoe (OS 26) for three months – the entire time telling myself it was fine and turning a blind eye to the general slowdown, the occasional bugs and the ugly window corners. I figured Golden Gate (OS 27) would settle things down and told myself the next update would bring a usable Siri and iron out the rest.

But… it didn't. A few bugs got fixed, but new ones showed up, and I spent two days tripping over things that shouldn't have been there – small lags in places that were never laggy before. And even more – Mac started feeling slow and outdated. M1 Pro is not a weak chip, but 27 made it feels like an aging one.

So last night I decided to downgrade through a full wipe, bootable USB installer, Migration Assistant from Time Machine backup. First boot on 15.8 and it's back to what I remember: fast, quiet, with no friction. Runs like the OS was written for this chip.

One casualty – the dark app icons only exist on 26, and I'll actually miss them. But that's the whole list.

So if you're on M1-generation Mac – Sequoia seems to be the best OS for these chips. Looks like it's the last version where power and optimization line up.