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I had to upgrade to Tahoe to use Xcode 26. This is on both an M1 Max w/ 64GB and an M4 Pro w/ 48GB. Performance doesn't seem to be a problem for me. Even MS Teams seems to be working pretty well. The one thing I noticed is that under load, the audio gets glitchy and breaks up quite frequently. Reboot usually resolves that.

I can't believe we are dismissing this away ..

"under load audio gets glitchy and breaks up quite frequently."
🥺

This is the stuff of Microsoft.
 
I’m usually a very late upgrader or don’t bother. I currently have the last Intel i7 MBP that was released pre M-Series. It’s currently on Sequoia and performs perfectly fine, no issues. Should I bother trying to update to Tahoe? Worried about doing so after some of these posts…!

I’m happy to stick to Sequoia and never update again, BTW. At least on this machine.
The thing is, like I say, I look forward to new releases. But I'm genuinely struggling to think of a single Tahoe feature that is significantly new or beneficial that I would use and Sequoia doesn't have.

I have Tahoe on my laptop and Sequoia on my Mini and not missing anything between the two, except Sequoia is nicer to use on the day to day than Tahoe, even though Tahoe is on a machine with more RAM.
 
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You could always maybe read OP's post in context, which you clearly so far have not. OP tried 26.1 RC to see if it improved the lousy experience he was having with 26.0, which from the start should at least equal the experience of 15.7.1. Because if it's worse than what it replaced then it's already lousy: it shouldn't need patches to bring it up to the standard and performance of what we already had. How have you been brainwashed to think that's acceptable?
Thanks for this reply on my behalf (not sarcasm!). I was tempted to reply to that person who clearly didn't read or understand my original post correctly, but couldn't be bothered.

For clarity, as I have multiple Macs. I wasn't using the Tahoe 0.1 beta initially. I was using the actual release. Trying the 0.1 beta was a later attempt to see if the bugginess had been ironed out with bug fixes.
 
Zero point to Apple Intelligence at this point. Zero point to Siri too imo. I also have it off, using other models instead.
Yup. I’ve got both turned off on all of my iOS and iPadOS devices as well. As others have said, I’m likely to hold off on any updates until 27.2.
 
Yup. I’ve got both turned off on all of my iOS and iPadOS devices as well. As others have said, I’m likely to hold off on any updates until 27.2.
I've been wondering if I should get an iPad 11 which is AI-free just to be safe. I have an iPad 9 now that still works just fine. I can wait though. No hurry. What to do with the MacBook Air currently on Sonoma is a good question. Try 27.2 when it comes out? Give up and install Linux? Wait until next fall when Sonoma support gets dropped then decide?

Adding to the fun my ISP is discontinuing their email service next spring. So I've got to change. Using Apple's is one option, but that implies keeping at least one Apple device running. The stereo cabinet mini is on Monterey which would count, but how long will Monterey still be counted as an Apple device for an email account?

The best of the other options appears to be Yahoo mail, but I have to put up with ads. Decisions decisions.
 
I've been wondering if I should get an iPad 11 which is AI-free just to be safe. I have an iPad 9 now that still works just fine. I can wait though. No hurry. What to do with the MacBook Air currently on Sonoma is a good question. Try 27.2 when it comes out? Give up and install Linux? Wait until next fall when Sonoma support gets dropped then decide?

Adding to the fun my ISP is discontinuing their email service next spring. So I've got to change. Using Apple's is one option, but that implies keeping at least one Apple device running. The stereo cabinet mini is on Monterey which would count, but how long will Monterey still be counted as an Apple device for an email account?

The best of the other options appears to be Yahoo mail, but I have to put up with ads. Decisions decisions.
Picking up an iPad 11 (often available for $299) is not a bad idea. I suppose you can wait until the iPad 12 is unveiled to confirm whether it will be AI-capable. If not, go for that because it’s the latest. Otherwise pick up with 11 then.

Personally, I have decided to hold off on any “upgrade” to 26 until most bugs are worked out. If that means waiting until 27.2, so be it.

If I use Gmail routed through Apple’s Mail client, I don’t get ads. The same with Microsoft Outlook. You might try that with Yahoo. But it has been my experience that Yahoo is a bit spam-prone. The same with the email service from my cable company.

If you don’t mind paying a few dollars for a very secure and private email service, I recommend Proton. They offer a solid VPN as well.
 
My adult son who is a senior dev is finding the same. Work machine is a M4 MBP 16 inch with M4 Pro CPU and 48 GB of RAM with Tahoe.

His own older machine is M2 MBA with 24 GB of RAM.

I'd love to see some real benchmarks on this if they exist. That's insanity. M2 on Sequoia outperforming an M4 Pro on Tahoe!?
 
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I'd love to see some real benchmarks on this if they exist. That's insanity. M2 on Sequoia outperforming an M4 Pro on Tahoe!?
For clarification, not suggesting that the M2 is intrinsically faster, nor that if you processed a video file on M2 Sequoia vs on M4 Tahoe then the M2/Sequoia would be the higher benchmark.

But my son is an AI dev, and on his day-to-day, he's usually got about 7 instances of VS studio open / running, 2 or 3 Sublime Text open for coding, more tabs that he can mention, Claude Code (API) plus Claude chat, slack, teams, outlook etc as well as all the other OS usual stuff like mail, calendar, FaceTime etc.

And on a 24 GB M2 Air with Sequoia it's all running just fine. Which is a testament to SoC and MacOS RAM and memory management too (and opens up a debate about how much RAM a person really needs.)

Now, is he swapping memory at times? For sure.

But this raises another question for me: If we didn't have activity monitor open (like it doesn't exist on iOS) then we wouldn't notice and be so concerned about RAM (just like no one is really concerned about RAM on iOS).

If he has similar open on a new M4 16 inch w/M4 Pro CPU and 48 GB RAM then the RAM is not swapping so it's not a hardware issue, but everything slows down or somethings glitch. It's a OS problem not a hardware issue.

This is why I tried the experiment of 'downgrading' from 32 RAM, which I thought I needed, to 16 GB w/Sequoia (I'm in biotech so using more stuff then Office software).

And it's been refreshing. The 16 GB works just fine for me it turns out and I should have trusted SoC and OS management better. It helps that I upgrade every 12-24 months so I don't need to worry about future proofing RAM.

Our coders get 16GB for their new machines too and they've all been fine.

That said, 32 GB w/M4 (not pro) for me with Tahoe was an absolute dog compared to M4 mini w/16 GB RAM and Sequoia.

Hardware side, Macs are superlative since they went to SoC, and the MBA design since the M2 has been a near perfect computer design, but Tahoe is probably my least favourite release since Lion.
 
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This is also the first release where I've held off from upgrading…
Same. Over the years I’ve never had any issues when upgrading the OS, but this time I’m holding off until we see a few more versions. For now my M3 iMac is running fine on Sequoia.

I have installed iOS 26 on my M2 iPad Air and iPhone 14 without issues. I’m getting used to it, but generally I prefer the look of the previous OS. Little details about the Liquid Glass I find fussy, annoying and not as clean as before. So much of it strikes me as change for the sake of change and not for the better. I think Apple stumbled with this one.
 
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I have zero issues with Tahoe. In my time with Mac OS X, I had far more problems with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and OS X 10.7 Lion. Both were far more resource-demanding than their precursors. OS X 10.7 Lion initially broke Wifi connections with campus networks, which is horrible when you are a student.
 
For clarification, not suggesting that the M2 is intrinsically faster, nor that if you processed a video file on M2 Sequoia vs on M4 Tahoe then the M2/Sequoia would be the higher benchmark.

But my son is an AI dev, and on his day-to-day, he's usually got about 7 instances of VS studio open / running, 2 or 3 Sublime Text open for coding, more tabs that he can mention, Claude Code (API) plus Claude chat, slack, teams, outlook etc as well as all the other OS usual stuff like mail, calendar, FaceTime etc.

And on a 24 GB M2 Air with Sequoia it's all running just fine. Which is a testament to SoC and MacOS RAM and memory management too (and opens up a debate about how much RAM a person really needs.)

Now, is he swapping memory at times? For sure.

But this raises another question for me: If we didn't have activity monitor open (like it doesn't exist on iOS) then we wouldn't notice and be so concerned about RAM (just like no one is really concerned about RAM on iOS).

If he has similar open on a new M4 16 inch w/M4 Pro CPU and 48 GB RAM then the RAM is not swapping so it's not a hardware issue, but everything slows down or somethings glitch. It's a OS problem not a hardware issue.

This is why I tried the experiment of 'downgrading' from 32 RAM, which I thought I needed, to 16 GB w/Sequoia (I'm in biotech so using more stuff then Office software).

And it's been refreshing. The 16 GB works just fine for me it turns out and I should have trusted SoC and OS management better. It helps that I upgrade every 12-24 months so I don't need to worry about future proofing RAM.

Our coders get 16GB for their new machines too and they've all been fine.

That said, 32 GB w/M4 (not pro) for me with Tahoe was an absolute dog compared to M4 mini w/16 GB RAM and Sequoia.

Hardware side, Macs are superlative since they went to SoC, and the MBA design since the M2 has been a near perfect computer design, but Tahoe is probably my least favourite release since Lion.
Swapping in Linux and macOS doesn’t work like what you thinking above.
 
I have a M4 Air (32GB) and M4 MBP with M4 Pro chip and 24 GB of RAM

Tahoe is just slow as sludge. It stutters, it glitches. Even resizing windows is a pain. This was on a clean install too. Got rid of all Electron apps, went onto 26.1 beta, still slow as sludge. Sharing screen on Teams was a nightmare.

The design changes folks moan about I don't mind. I'm fine with it on iOS. It's just that it's made a computer seem unusable.

Got myself a M4 Mac mini from Amazon yesterday. Only the base model with 16 GB of RAM.

I guess it's been lying around at Amazon for over a month because it came with Sequoia. It's like a dream compared to the more powerful MacBooks I have.

Fast, responsive, no glitching. And I'm not missing any Tahoe feature I can think of.

I always upgrade as soon as a new release comes out. I'm a dev tester too. I've never known a MacOS so bad in terms of being like sludge and buggy. Design is subjective for people so we can argue about that.

My adult son who is a senior dev is finding the same. Work machine is a M4 MBP 16 inch with M4 Pro CPU and 48 GB of RAM with Tahoe.

His own older machine is M2 MBA with 24 GB of RAM.

He's switched to his M2 MBA with Sequoia over his M4 MBP with Tahoe for coding and work, simply because it's faster in the day to day and isn't glitching under load from multiple applications even though it has half the RAM and half the CPU and GPU.

First time, I've felt compelled to say this is a terrible release in terms of performance and usability. It feels that Sequoia is the newer OS and Tahoe is the older, clunkier OS.
Did Microsoft update teams for latest os. If my client uses teams, I ask them to ship me windows laptop. Teams can have my M4 max 128 GB RAM fans going off at times with nothing running on my mac. Do you see same issue with out teams? Swap isn’t a bad thing, it helps to reload some of the apps offloaded to swap that are not actively used.
 
Did Microsoft update teams for latest os. If my client uses teams, I ask them to ship me windows laptop. Teams can have my M4 max 128 GB RAM fans going off at times with nothing running on my mac. Do you see same issue with out teams? Swap isn’t a bad thing, it helps to reload some of the apps offloaded to swap that are not actively used.
Teams has recently updated. It's updated 4x since the release of Tahoe. It doesn't seem to be the problem by itself (at least not anymore). I'm wondering the the Teams updates and having the Tahoe 0.1 RC on my other machine has mitigated this.

On M4 mini with the latest Teams and Sequoia, no obvious problems. That said, we use Basecamp and Slack for everything, and only Teams for video, so I don't live it running, only opening it for meetings.

I last heard fans on Teams when I had a pre-M series MBA. It was unbearable. Obviously no fans on M series MBA. And haven't heard fans over the last few years on M2 and M4 Mac minis either.

I did consider getting NUC box for Teams / Office work. But I just can't bring myself to use Windows after 25 years. I did try briefly on a Thinkpad last years, and thought forget this.
 
Swapping in Linux and macOS doesn’t work like what you thinking above.
Would genuinely be interested in elaboration, especially for MacOS. The point is, outside of looking at Activity Monitor, not really noticing anything happening when using the computer when swapping is happening.
 
My MacBook Air is still on Sequoia, while my iMac is on Tahoe. Sequoia feels like a polished and streamlined "pro" OS and Tahoe feels like a dumbed down "fun" OS with those goofy ultra rounded corners and weird nonsensical layers all over the UI -- not to mention just tons of little bugs all over the place. Liquid Glass is honestly the least of the issues.
 
Would genuinely be interested in elaboration, especially for MacOS. The point is, outside of looking at Activity Monitor, not really noticing anything happening when using the computer when swapping is happening.
MacOS off loads some of the stuff which has not been used for a while to swap, and it can be loaded back quickly if needed. It makes sense from performance perspective that last thing you want to do under heavy load is start swapping. It will clear out when you restart, I rarely restart and run heavy loads. My 128 GB RAM MBP swaps and lot of it is OS caching in memory for faster switching between apps and offloading those memory pages to swap. Linux also does but you can set how aggressively you want to swap or setting to 0 disables the proactive swapping.
I did disable the swap once and mac was unusable under heavy load, it was crawling. I don’t really worry about swapping, it’s not big deal with long lasting high speed nand chips on MBP.
 
Teams has recently updated. It's updated 4x since the release of Tahoe. It doesn't seem to be the problem by itself (at least not anymore). I'm wondering the the Teams updates and having the Tahoe 0.1 RC on my other machine has mitigated this.

On M4 mini with the latest Teams and Sequoia, no obvious problems. That said, we use Basecamp and Slack for everything, and only Teams for video, so I don't live it running, only opening it for meetings.

I last heard fans on Teams when I had a pre-M series MBA. It was unbearable. Obviously no fans on M series MBA. And haven't heard fans over the last few years on M2 and M4 Mac minis either.

I did consider getting NUC box for Teams / Office work. But I just can't bring myself to use Windows after 25 years. I did try briefly on a Thinkpad last years, and thought forget this.
I rarely updates my mac to latest os as it usually takes few months for devs to get it right, let alone Apple to fix some defects. My iPad runs developer beta version, my iPhone usually updates with in a month after major release. For Mac, I hold for at least 6 months.
I don’t bother using teams on Mac, I can live with a windows laptop for Microsoft teams and outlook.
 
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