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macOS "Tahoe" 26.5 released: Is it time to upgrade from Sequoia? (poll)

With macOS 26.5 released, is Tahoe ready for mainstream use?

  • Yes — Things are running pretty smooth on my system(s), upgrading should be fine

    Votes: 207 61.1%

  • No — Based on my personal experience with Tahoe, there are still some issues, waiting is best

    Votes: 62 18.3%

  • No — Based on comments and feedback from others or things I have read, I am waiting longer

    Votes: 70 20.6%
  • Total voters
    339
  • Poll closed .
I finally made the leap about 10 minutes ago from Sonoma > macOS 26.5.

Initial impressions. The rounded corners are indeed bonkers. And I encountered a visual bug in settings where all the toggles in iCloud sync settings looked gray (and off) but were actually on. But a reload of that view fixed it. Hopefully just a one off.

It strangely rolled back istat menus to version 6 even though when I open the app it says version 7.3??? But I actually like the way I had things set up in version 6 better (I upgraded to ensure things would be compatible with Tahoe). Not sure if that will stick but I can't complain.

Scrolling feels smoother.

I am withholding my vote until I've had more time to evaluate. But so far so good.
 
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I have updated from macOS 15.7.7 to 26.5 yesterday. No problems with the update. Everything is functioning for my needs. I'm not crazy about the rounded corners and wasted space, but it is working at an acceptable speed for me. The return of the colored folders are nice. 😀
 
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macOS 26.5 is good I feel. Quick and they finally fixed the wild Finder columns draggable thing, now it's just the resize cursor like you'd expect.

Screenshot 2026-05-16 at 5.46.03 PM.png


Hot take: I like the rounded corners. Better matches their new iPhone hardware corners (the iPhone is actually more rounded) and with a 27" 4K or higher display in HiDPI there is more than enough room still. Can't speak to it on a MacBook.
 
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JulianL said:
I'm a very new MacOS user, I moved from Windows after 35 years of using that on my desktop PC (most recently Windows 11) to MacOS when my first ever Mac hardware (M5 MacBook Pro) arrived 15 days ago, initially with 26.4 installed but I installed the 26.5 update as soon as it was released so that is what I'm running now.

While I'm blown away by the speed and smoothness of the system - I suspect a combination of the spectacularly good hardware specs and probably some very competent kernel engineers who do actually live up to Apple's messaging that tight integration of Apple-controlled software with a reasonably well-constrained set of Apple-controlled hardware yields good results - I am surprised and disappointed by some other aspects of Tahoe. One thing in particular bugs me a lot and I'm wondering if it is an artefact of Liquid Glass or if it was an issue before that. The issue that is bugging me is the handling of the mouse pointer, something that I would have thought would be a very basic thing to get right.

What I see is that, even in core Apple apps such as Mail or Safari (I haven't actually installed a single third-party app yet and am copying data/bookmarks/etc ver manually rather than using the migration tool so I'm running a very clean system), if I'm doing something in the main app display area and then go up to the app's toolbar to click a button, maybe to archive an email in the Apple Mail app, the mouse pointer often (very often - maybe 50% of the time) stays stuck on whatever state it was in when it was within the main Mail display area so I often find myself navigating the app's toolbar not with a mouse arrow but with the mouse pointer still as a grab-hand or a tall thin text edit cursor. Clicking the toolbar button still does what's expected but it's annoying clicking a button with a big grab-hand or a text editing cursor rather than an arrow pointer and it's something I never encountered in any Microsoft Windows release that I can remember so I'm rather surprised and disappointed to see such sloppy glitches in MacOS.

Is this something that others have noticed and if so is it a new glitch with Tahoe/Liquid-Glass or was it always like this? I'm struggling to think it might be something specific to my setup because my MacBook was set up as new so no migration tool has had a chance to interfere with anything and as I mentioned above I haven't installed a single third-party app yet so it's pretty much a factory-fresh machine still.
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Welcome to the Mac world!

Windows is the slow down issue on PC hardware. Run any full variant of linux (I mean, not a lightweight version, so apples for apples comparison) on the same hardware and get an instant 2x, at least, speed boost in day to day interactions. It's probably not going to help with compiling times, etc but it will feel faster overall. Windows is just so inefficient these days. Besides that, the M series hardware is, indeed, incredible.
 
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Steph.fr said:
What's the point at this stage? We might as well wait for "27. Snow Tahoe," or maybe "28. Frozen Tahoe," and finally "29. Blizzard Tahoe."

I wonder if Airbnb demand around that cursed lake has dropped since this Apple OS update? 🤔


Notice to moderators: Please consider that this post contains no political undertones; I have no grievance against the governors of California or Nevada.
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Whatever you may think of Mac OS versions, Lake Tahoe is not a "cursed lake." My guess is that you have never been there.
 
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QuarterSwede said:
Welcome to the Mac world!

Windows is the slow down issue on PC hardware. Run any full variant of linux (I mean, not a lightweight version, so apples for apples comparison) on the same hardware and get an instant 2x, at least, speed boost in day to day interactions. It's probably not going to help with compelling times, etc but it will feel faster overall. Windows is just so inefficient these days. Besides that, the M series hardware is, indeed, incredible.
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Thanks for the welcome.

I tend to agree. I'm coming to the conclusion that ...

1 - Apple hardware - amazing

2 - Apple kernel & low level system function engineering - hard to fully judge without spending ages looking at and trying to evaluate the quality of the source code (at one point in my career I was a Unix System V kernel developer at Bell Labs) but from my impressions of using my new MacBook and how smooth it feels that is also at least excellent.

3 - Higher-level user-facing software engineering - this is where I think Apple is letting itself down quite a bit in that, while macOS Tahoe is to my eyes mostly more visually appealing than Windows 11 (even with the very rounded corners!), it has issues in terms of glitches and some (in my opinion) bad design decisions. I admit that opinions on whether a particular design decision is good or bad can be subjective but at least one that I've encountered seems egregiously bad to me.

Still, I don't for one moment regret my decision to switch because 1 and 2 above make a huge difference and hopefully 3 can improve with time - plus my point 3 was not all criticism; I do like how fresh and pretty MacOS feels. My occasional trips back to my Windows PC to fetch or check something as part of moving off that old system already feel a bit jarring and that reinforces my impression that I've done the right thing.
 
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Does the new app launcher still lack basic features like the ability to move apps and create folders? Are animations like opening Quick Look still choppy on the M4 Mac Mini?
 
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I'm not throwing it on my MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) out of respect for it as the ultimate Intel Mac laptop and not wanting to see it brought to its knees with no practical benefit.

It's on my Mac mini (M1, 2020); which has 16GB and regularly is in yellow memory pressure in Tahoe. It's not on my MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020); which also has 16GB of RAM and, honestly, I probably won't throw it on there either; since I'm about to (a) replace it with an M5 15-inch MacBook Air that will come with Tahoe and (b) relegate it to running non-game Intel apps before Rosetta 2 becomes games-only in macOS 28 and while it's still fast on Sequoia.

It's really irritating how Apple manages to further bloat macOS without providing any meaningful benefit over what we had in the previous year's OS.
 
Does anyone else have a problem in Tahoe 26.5 where if you open the Settings app as a large window (with the iCloud section visible), the iCloud icon is missing/broken, while it appears if you open the app as a small window and scroll down? Other users on Reddit have had exactly this behaviour since at least the 26.3 build, so I'm guessing this is a glitch.
 
Steph.fr said:
What's the point at this stage? We might as well wait for "27. Snow Tahoe," or maybe "28. Frozen Tahoe," and finally "29. Blizzard Tahoe."

I wonder if Airbnb demand around that cursed lake has dropped since this Apple OS update? 🤔


Notice to moderators: Please consider that this post contains no political undertones; I have no grievance against the governors of California or Nevada.
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I suppose they could have named it "26 Donner Pass." That area is also quite pretty but still carries a connotation.

At this point there is no point in updating to 26. I'll just wait until 27 and see how that shakes out.

As for the "Because the Mac doesn't exist in a vacuum" therefore it has to look like an iPhone (the Vision thing is now dead and buried) in this house the Mac does exist in a vacuum. If visual consistency is that important then the Cinnamon edition of the Mac OS please. Clean, sharp, easy to read, no clutter. Yes I prefer it even to KDE Plasma.

If 27 is good I'll update the MBA. If Apple blows it again then the MBA goes to Sequoia and I'll look at 28. If that fails then the MBA goes to Linux since that is an option now.
 
Siliconguy said:
I suppose they could have named it "26 Donner Pass." That area is also quite pretty but still carries a connotation.
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Good one!

I've got an M1 Mini (running headless) and an M3 Pro MBP running Sonoma and an M4 Pro Mini running Sequoia all waiting for the 25 issues to settle down. Been thinking of upgrading one of the Mac's to 26.5 to check it out and figure that it may be safe after 27 is released.

Wasted screen space is still a sore point for me even when using a pair of 27" monitors.
 
JulianL said:
2 - Apple kernel & low level system function engineering - hard to fully judge without spending ages looking at and trying to evaluate the quality of the source code (at one point in my career I was a Unix System V kernel developer at Bell Labs) but from my impressions of using my new MacBook and how smooth it feels that is also at least excellent.

3 - Higher-level user-facing software engineering - this is where I think Apple is letting itself down quite a bit in that, while macOS Tahoe is to my eyes mostly more visually appealing than Windows 11 (even with the very rounded corners!), it has issues in terms of glitches and some (in my opinion) bad design decisions. I admit that opinions on whether a particular design decision is good or bad can be subjective but at least one that I've encountered seems egregiously bad to me.
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Having had exposure to various flavors of UNIX and UNIX like systems, MacOS comes across as a much more comfortable environment than Windows. One difference is a greater effort on adhering to a software design when extending the OS as opposed to the accrete guano approach in windows.

One place where MacOS really shines is in the way the network interface is handled. An example is changing the IP address where the menus needed are easy to find and easy to use - and no reboot is needed for a change to take effect.
 
I have a Chromebook, multiple Mac's and Linux systems at home. I upgrade macOS whenever updates appear and all generally remains well. They are doing a better job these days compared to the past 2+ decades with software releases.

I don't care about "new & improved" for the most part so some of what gets added is more window dressing than added value for my purposes.
 
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I am going to wait until colorful balloons float randomly across my screen when I am trying to work, along with pink triangles and rainbows. Until then, Sequoia all the way, baby!
 
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