After a month of Tahoe's seemingly controversial visuals, Bob Pony is apparently among the first to discover and reveal a hidden key that largely,
actually, tells the system to continue using Sequoia-style visuals for all kinds of things: windows, sidebars, toolbars, widgets, and more. Even the Music app is reverted!
It's possible to entirely disable Liquid Glass in macOS 26 Tahoe, there's some visual issues such as the Control Center and the text hover in the dock, but it's mostly usable with the Liquid Glass disabled surprisingly! If you want to try this yourself... 🧵
bsky.app
Adam Engst also explains how to enable this
using a Terminal command.
(Please use caution and ask yourself whether you're comfortable before tinkering with "plists" or Terminal commands.)
As Bob points out, it's not perfect. App icons in the Dock still bear the specular highlights, Control Center becomes
fully transparent, photos in the Photos app hide behind the sidebar. The Contacts app, while thankfully largely reverted, isn't quite right.
But for me, who, after a month, has never suppressed my internal questioning about whether the zealousness of the "new design" and Liquid Glass are appropriate for the Mac – a true first for this longtime Mac user – it still provides more relief than Tahoe provides delight. I'll be expressing this to
Apple's feedback form in my next (of many) chapters of correspondence with it, and I urge the like-minded to do the same.
I've really valued reading the range of opinions and feelings of the community during this dramatic update. When something you deeply care about seems to have gone more than slightly wrong, those who empathize are the next best source of what lacks.
What do you think about this discovery, and about Tahoe after a month?
