macOS 27: All the Rumors So Far

[Max_G]

No Mac is backwards compatible with an older OS. For me this means: no new Mac until MacOS shines again. Until then I will stay on Sequoia, with matching machines.

 

[LV426]

Who needs a Mac with a touch screen?

Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

 

[svish]

Waiting to see the Siri and Apple Intelligence upgrades. As for changes due to rumored touch screen on MacBook, not expecting to see or hear anything at WWDC. All new capabilities due to touch screen will be announced only when the hardware launches.

 

[MacHeritage]

Please go back to a functional GUI/OS. This current version is utter garbage in my opinion. And I've been on Macs since OS 7. As someone else said, even that image of a possible look is atrocious.

Same, since Mac OS 7.5.5 to be exact, and I feel the same way. It really is the worst Apple has made and so glad I don't have to use it yet.

 

[kharys415]

Touch screens are completely unnecessary. They're just a new way for your mac to break.

Completely agreed on them being unnecessary, but I think it would actually come with improved screen durability. Macs are currently made with an extremely fragile glass layer, and adding a digitizer to it without making it thicker and stronger is the last thing they'd want to do.

I want to believe that this whole thing is just a false rumor but it's probably the only practical explanation for Tahoe's cartoonishly huge UI.

 

[Dead0k]

Return back to Macos 15 design and move on from there

 

[xXRainKingXx]

Steve Jobs already explained why touchscreen Macs are stupid.

 

[Philip_S]

Curious: what aspect/s is/are broken? I've not yet noticed. Thanks.

There's a whole thread on it here

TLDR, some of the most unpopular:

1. giant waste of space, vertically and horizontally (you can see much more in edit mode)
2. it randomly duplicates contact lists when syncing with Microsoft accounts.
3. you can't set the poster on macOS, so if you have a photo it automatically picks a colour from it and makes a horrible background (sometimes with terrible contrast)
4. Weird UI choices when copying details (Cmd-C on the card copies the name if pasted in a text context, but bolded as displayed in contacts, with seems like something almost no one would ever want)
5. if a contact is marked as a company, it shows the company name twice, once where the person's name would otherwise be shown and once where it normally is.
6. if there is a personal name as well as the company (e.g. the owner or the receptionist) it doesn't show that at all unless you click into edit mode (but if you set it as a person, it doesn't sort by company)
7. if there's no photo, it doesn't eliminate the space for the photo
8. if there's no poster or photo the automatic background is inconsistent with everything else, and has lousy contrast.
9. Flickering, for some users
10. they removed drag and drop for contact photos (apparently on purpose), so now you can only use Photos.app, Memoji, or their clip-art.

 

[doobydoooby]

Less glass or I'll pass

This floating sidebar on the left will never stop bothering me, and why on Earth would you want the content area to be translucent and showing what's underneath?

View attachment 2607952

This. The idea that Intel computers will be left abandoned with the pigs breakfast that is Tahoe is a bit galling

 

[Philip_S]

Return back to Macos 15 design and move on from there

IMO a hybrid of panther and leopard, but with San Francisco fonts, OTF-based icons, and official dark mode (or styles loaded from a user-writeable location) would be my ideal Mac UI. I'm not a fan of the pinstripes, but flat greys isn't much of an improvement over flat white.

 

[Janichsan]

...and why on Earth would you want the content area to be translucent and showing what's underneath?

View attachment 2607952

I generally agree with that question, but in this specific example: the window is explicitly set by the user to be transparent. Look at the leftmost button in the toolbar: the left option selects an opaque window background, the right (selected) one is for a transparent one. That person is editing the transparent/glassy version of the icon. The transparent window background option here is to let them check how it looks on the desktop while working on it.

 

[zoozx]

Hopefully Killing Tahoe Off and all its many design FLAWS.

 

[PieVsCake]

This will probably be the version of OSX that finally puts the last nail in AFP's coffin. I still have plenty of users who prefer AFP over Apples implementation of SMB due to performance concerns. It's gotten better with all the tweaks going around in the community, but I would prefer it if Apples out of box SMB performance especially to Windows based shares was a bit more performant.

 

[neomorpheus]

that Apple is preparing a touch-optimized version of macOS for the rumored MacBook Pro with a touch screen.

Man, tim "Dont be poor" Cooks has really been giving his customers the middle finger in all possible ways he can before he leaves.

 

[CarAnalogy]

Less glass or I'll pass

This floating sidebar on the left will never stop bothering me, and why on Earth would you want the content area to be translucent and showing what's underneath?

View attachment 2607952

Boy that screenshot is awful.

Snow Leopard was great. Looking forward to a bug fix edition of macOS again.

That’s the thing, I don’t see how this can be both a bug fix release and yet another major interface overhaul.

It still astounds me that Apple watched Microsoft do this same thing to themselves out of fear of the iPad and it was a decade long disaster. And now they want to do it to themselves for no reason at all.

 

[Funky_Alphonzo]

Going all the way back to Steve Jobs, Apple executives have been telling us that a touch screen on a Mac doesn't work. I wonder what suddenly changed their opinion.

Hopefully, it's meant for making the desktop OS compatible with the iPad... and the rumours about the touch screen Macbook are just a misunderstanding.

 

[Philip_S]

Going all the way back to Steve Jobs, Apple executives have been telling us that a touch screen on a Mac doesn't work. I wonder what suddenly changed their opinion.

Gurman has been predicting that the next MacBook Pro will have a touchscreen for at least a decade. IDK if he's wish-casting, channelling the spirit of Howard Camping, or just lacking in memory.

I guess it's fine if we can just turn it off, but then I'm more likely to have someone else touch the screen and leave fingerprints now because they've been trained to touch it.

On the plus side, they would probably use oleophobic coating like on iPhones, eliminating the problem of the keyboard printing on the screen - they've slightly increased the spacing, reducing the problem but not entirely fixing it if you're unlucky with the tolerances.

The Chinese/Asian UI aesthetic has been creeping into cars and tech for so long it seemingly can't be undone. Personally I think it's hideous - it's the McMansion of design. There's a weird cultural barrier like how it somehow makes sense for BYD to have the text "LIVE YOUR DREAM" on the back yet everyone in the West is dumbfounded by it.

IMO the east asian UI aesthetic is more the "display everything all at once so you can see it" approach that, when overdone, is still more useful than hiding controls behind pointless menus that designers in the west (such as Ive) seem to love.

"Build Your Dreams" is because the actual expansion of BYD isn't a good name in English.

No, Apple Glass has not wrecked my life, just another theme du jour,

They've done better and worse, but IMO the real hate is for badly-designed application changes, such as Music, Contacts, etc., without fixing previously mangled apps like maps

 

[DocMultimedia]

Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

With gigantic screens. That was a pretty entertaining scene. But the transfer of data on a physical device seemed dumb to me even at the time with all the technology around him (can't remember exactly what was on that stick in the scene).

 

[elptdbi3lYI]

Touch screen mac is guaranteed, so macOS ens.hitification will continue as planned.

 

[FoxyKaye]

Boy that screenshot is awful.

Snow Leopard was great. Looking forward to a bug fix edition of macOS again.

Here’s hoping! I’m going to just bide my time with Sequoia in the meantime. It’s a shame, because I love Tahoe, the place, a great deal.

 

[LV426]

With gigantic screens. That was a pretty entertaining scene. But the transfer of data on a physical device seemed dumb to me even at the time with all the technology around him (can't remember exactly what was on that stick in the scene).

If I recall correctly, the machine made a record of the future event by imprinting a serial number on a wooden ball. The idea was that the natural striations in wood are hard to fake. Or something like that. These days, we have Apple's Secure Enclave.

 

[FatLouie]

Oh wow, that's so pretty! Love it and hope they don't can it before release.

'Pretty' is for 5-year-old children with Crayons and a coloring book. I need a visibly functional GUI, not a pretty interface.

 

[lazyrighteye]

There's a whole thread on it here

TLDR, some of the most unpopular:

1. giant waste of space, vertically and horizontally (you can see much more in edit mode)
2. it randomly duplicates contact lists when syncing with Microsoft accounts.
3. you can't set the poster on macOS, so if you have a photo it automatically picks a colour from it and makes a horrible background (sometimes with terrible contrast)
4. Weird UI choices when copying details (Cmd-C on the card copies the name if pasted in a text context, but bolded as displayed in contacts, with seems like something almost no one would ever want)
5. if a contact is marked as a company, it shows the company name twice, once where the person's name would otherwise be shown and once where it normally is.
6. if there is a personal name as well as the company (e.g. the owner or the receptionist) it doesn't show that at all unless you click into edit mode (but if you set it as a person, it doesn't sort by company)
7. if there's no photo, it doesn't eliminate the space for the photo
8. if there's no poster or photo the automatic background is inconsistent with everything else, and has lousy contrast.
9. Flickering, for some users
10. they removed drag and drop for contact photos (apparently on purpose), so now you can only use Photos.app, Memoji, or their clip-art.

Thanks for sharing. I do hate that contact photos can only be added via Photos.

 

[bluecoast]

A properly developed mouse/keyboard interactivity paradigm is still the most efficient and productive way to navigate macOS, but it feels contrived not to enable at least some touch interactivity at this late stage of Apple’s iPhone/iPad era. I know this ultimately puts the iPad in a bit of an awkward marketing position, but that shouldn’t be the reason Apple holds back anymore. Skate to where the puck is headed, as the saying goes.

I wonder if it's an age thing?

I think people who grew up with the iPhone iPads find it weird that Macs haven't got touchscreens. Yeah, I realise that this is a massive generalisation .

As for me, I find it weird that anyone would want a MacBook with a touchscreen.

However, the iPad with a mouse and touchpad is perfect.

 

[Peitjah Puck]

It started with Siri upgrades and then I lost all appetite to read one more word.