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MacOS Tahoe on Intel

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BevInTX

macrumors newbie
Original poster
When it first came out, I had read that there were some issues with macOS Tahoe on Intel Macs, such as performance. For that reason, I've held off upgrading my 2019 16" MacBook Pro (16 GB memory) from Sequoia to Tahoe. It's now the middle of January, so I'm wondering whether things have improved? I'd appreciate feedback from those running Tahoe on an Intel Mac.

I'm aware that some Tahoe features are unavailable on Intel Macs. I am running iPadOS 26 on my iPad, so I'm already familiar with LG (Liquid Glass).
 
I recently upgraded my 2020 27” iMac to Tahoe and haven’t noticed any real differences or problems from Sequoia. It’s been just as solid so far. Upgraded right to 26.2.

i5 iMac with 64GB RAM.
 
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MultiFinder17 said:
I recently upgraded my 2020 27” iMac to Tahoe and haven’t noticed any real differences or problems from Sequoia. It’s been just as solid so far. Upgraded right to 26.2.

i5 iMac with 64GB RAM.
Click to expand...
Thanks! That encourages me, though you have 4 times the memory on your iMac than I have on my MacBook Pro.
 
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ADGrant said:
It has 4GB of VRAM based on that link you shared: "Radeon Pro 5300 graphics processor with 4 GB of dedicated GDDR6 video memory. "
Click to expand...
Correct, it has the Radeon Pro 5300 with 4GB VRAM. I'm saying that I've upgraded my system to 64GB of system RAM 🙂
 
Until a few weeks ago, I had a maxed out 2019 i9 64GB 5500M with 8GB GDDR6 VRAM running 26.2. It was ok. Sometimes animations would be smooth, other times things would be a bit jittery (Mission Control with more than two apps, scrolling through or editing Contacts). It works but even my top of the line GPU either struggled or Tahoe GUI simply isn’t optimized for Intel. Opening Finder|Apps often it takes time for the App icons to render, same with the new Launchpad replacement. Scrolling through apps seem to lag and take time to populate.

Side note: I also think Tahoe looks much better with ProMotion. You can definitely tell the animations are not as smooth on the built in 16” display and even Apple Studio Display (both 60Hz). But on my Alienware 4K display at 120Hz, things look so much smoother. With my new M5 MacBook with ProMotion, GUI looks much more fluid. In fact, my M5 also runs my Alienware display at 165Hz and everything is so buttery smooth that I am holding out for an updated ASD but with ProMotion. I think Tahoe really needs higher refresh rates to make the animations and glass look its best.

Having said all that, Tahoe is perfectly useable and you can continue to be productive using it on a 2019 16” if you have a dedicated GPU. But some things won’t feel as peppy or smooth as Sequoia.
 
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conmee said:
Having said all that, Tahoe is perfectly useable and you can continue to be productive using it on a 2019 16” if you have a dedicated GPU. But some things won’t feel as peppy or smooth as Sequoia.
Click to expand...
This is my experience as well with my 2019 16” i7/16GB RAM. Perfectly usable with no major issues, just not as snappy as Sequoia.
 
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BevInTX said:
When it first came out, I had read that there were some issues with macOS Tahoe on Intel Macs, such as performance. For that reason, I've held off upgrading my 2019 16" MacBook Pro (16 GB memory) from Sequoia to Tahoe. It's now the middle of January, so I'm wondering whether things have improved? I'd appreciate feedback from those running Tahoe on an Intel Mac.

I'm aware that some Tahoe features are unavailable on Intel Macs. I am running iPadOS 26 on my iPad, so I'm already familiar with LG (Liquid Glass).
Click to expand...
My experience with the 16" MacBook Pro i9-9880H CPU @ 2.30GHz, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB, was okay at the first iterations of Tahoe, until I tried to update to the 26.3 dev/public beta. The CPU is throttling to 0.8GHz constantly, making the MacBook unusable. It may be sitting idle at 60 degrees C, core utilisation at 10%, package power consumption at 4~5W and still sit at 1.0GHz! (data from Intel Power Gadget). It needs to sleep/wakeup to exit this state, only to enter again at the slightest load, like running MAME for example, or Microsoft Teams.
I disabled completely spotlight, to make it somewhat usable, because it was behaving like that even when it was idle, but the difference I see in comparison with Sequoia is that it constantly tries to use the Intel UHD Graphics 630, even when it's on an external monitor with the AMD Radeon being the sole card that was used before in such case.
Any game that has the slightest animation is enough to make the CPU throttle that low as I described above. Once I'll get from work an M4 Mac Mini, I'm transferring everything there, and I'm switching back the MacBook Pro to Sequoia. This is just planned obsolescence!
 
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I don’t think it’s planned obsolescence as it is blatant disregard for Intel holdouts like ourselves (I sold my 16” and restored Mojave on my 15”).

I think Stone Cold sums up Apple regard for Intel users five plus years into the Apple Silicon era. And I’m not even really mad about it anymore. Consider every new update a Stone Cold Stunner on your MacBook Pro… 😉

IMG_0434.gif
 
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Stay away if you're on Intel especially if you're doing any meaningful work. Maybe check in again when it's .6

I blocked Tahoe update on my 2019 Mac Pro and will be sticking to Sequoia. Had to downgrade back and it took me 2 days to move stuff over, what a waste of time.
 
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Probably depends on what you think is okay for your mac to run at. There is quite alot of people who look positively on a degraded mac for the perceived security fixes (pro tip, your mac is still insecure from next months fixes.. be careful!😛). If you don't care that your mac is simply not as effective at being a computer anymore its checks out.

But i probably have a different opinion, sonoma was the macos that bloated out of intel... its never been the same since. core i9.

Will check tahoe out again when its finished for something to do, but i'm not expecting miracles. Tahoe seems clearly designed to make m1 mac owners think its time to upgrade, so unless something changes, or you drastically turn the internals off i dont see how it could be something positive.
 
Aside from plenty of visual/UI annoyances (and embarrassments), Tahoe runs great on my Intel iMac.

iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020
- 3.3 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5
- AMD Radeon Pro 5300 4 GB
- 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
- Tahoe 26.3

I was avoiding upgrading because of all the chanting of "Tahoe is awful! Don't upgrade!" and "It runs so much worse on Intel Macs!" But a couple of weeks ago, when Tahoe was still at version 26.2 and Software Update wouldn't stop nagging me to upgrade, my iMac started acting weird... right after a power outage.

Long story short, I ended up in Recovery Mode, successfully ran First Aid in Disk Utility, fixing some minor things, but then I couldn't start up normally. I forget the error messages, but eventually I got a message that said I need to reinstall the macOS on my system. OK, fine, I thought -- let's reinstall Sequoia. But after I initiated the process, I got an error message! Wouldn't reinstall Sequoia. I tried several times, no go.

At this point, I'm tearing my hair out, thinking I'm going to have to buy a new iMac.

But then I tried Internet Recovery Mode and, shockingly, it let me install Tahoe!

All my data was fine. HD passed First Aid with no errors or warnings.

OK, but surely the tradeoff of once again having a working iMac is an eyesore of an OS, a million bugs and new issues, and severely degraded performance, like everyone has been talking about, right?

Nope.

I mean, sure, there are plenty of visual/UI annoyances that make Tahoe's interface seem like an early draft that needs a world of refinement (or outright scraping in some areas), but as far as everyday use and performance? I'm honestly not seeing much, if any, difference from Sequoia. Still snappy, nothing impeding my workflow.

I got about a million and one issues with the Music app (as someone who uses it exclusively for my local library of 4,000+ albums), but it has been a dumpster fire for awhile now -- and yes, even worse on Tahoe.

Of course, individual use varies, so just because it's been fine for me... well, you know.

It is weird, though, how my computer problems ended up forcing me to upgrade. You shady, Apple.
 
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I tried todays patch on my i9 intel macbook pro for science.

- General response is notably aggressive as previous.
- Every mouse click seems to be pushing though / has resistance from bloat as previous.
- Low power mode is even more aggressive as my last experience ventura.
- I actually downloaded most of my productivty apps from the app store this time.
- The rounded window corners are mental.. /sigh.
- The only "unusable" windows app is itunes. I have a high tolerence, especially for stupid icandy, but that was too much. The overlaid transparencies have significantly crossed the line of offensive.

With a sinking feeling, you could definitely use this as a desktop os. There's just so... much... bloat... but unlike windows 10, you actually feel the many tens of processes you have no idea what they're doing constantly running in the background.

------------------------

Again, you could give them a solid try if they were told to take out m1 with this.

But wading though the bloat.. it does run things aggressively (a positive).

------------------------

The only thing is, every prior macos makes running it stupid. I don't think it can overcome itself on this one. Every click, every tab, every window, is just wading through it.
 
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mscrutchin said:
Aside from plenty of visual/UI annoyances (and embarrassments), Tahoe runs great on my Intel iMac.

iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020
- 3.3 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5
- AMD Radeon Pro 5300 4 GB
- 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
- Tahoe 26.3

I was avoiding upgrading because of all the chanting of "Tahoe is awful! Don't upgrade!" and "It runs so much worse on Intel Macs!" But a couple of weeks ago, when Tahoe was still at version 26.2 and Software Update wouldn't stop nagging me to upgrade, my iMac started acting weird... right after a power outage.

Long story short, I ended up in Recovery Mode, successfully ran First Aid in Disk Utility, fixing some minor things, but then I couldn't start up normally. I forget the error messages, but eventually I got a message that said I need to reinstall the macOS on my system. OK, fine, I thought -- let's reinstall Sequoia. But after I initiated the process, I got an error message! Wouldn't reinstall Sequoia. I tried several times, no go.

At this point, I'm tearing my hair out, thinking I'm going to have to buy a new iMac.

But then I tried Internet Recovery Mode and, shockingly, it let me install Tahoe!

All my data was fine. HD passed First Aid with no errors or warnings.

OK, but surely the tradeoff of once again having a working iMac is an eyesore of an OS, a million bugs and new issues, and severely degraded performance, like everyone has been talking about, right?

Nope.

I mean, sure, there are plenty of visual/UI annoyances that make Tahoe's interface seem like an early draft that needs a world of refinement (or outright scraping in some areas), but as far as everyday use and performance? I'm honestly not seeing much, if any, difference from Sequoia. Still snappy, nothing impeding my workflow.

I got about a million and one issues with the Music app (as someone who uses it exclusively for my local library of 4,000+ albums), but it has been a dumpster fire for awhile now -- and yes, even worse on Tahoe.

Of course, individual use varies, so just because it's been fine for me... well, you know.

It is weird, though, how my computer problems ended up forcing me to upgrade. You shady, Apple.
Click to expand...
Thank you for your useful report. I have a 2020 iMac too and will at some point need to upgrade.
 
mscrutchin said:
Aside from plenty of visual/UI annoyances (and embarrassments), Tahoe runs great on my Intel iMac.

iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020
- 3.3 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5
- AMD Radeon Pro 5300 4 GB
- 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
- Tahoe 26.3

I was avoiding upgrading because of all the chanting of "Tahoe is awful! Don't upgrade!" and "It runs so much worse on Intel Macs!" But a couple of weeks ago, when Tahoe was still at version 26.2 and Software Update wouldn't stop nagging me to upgrade, my iMac started acting weird... right after a power outage.

Long story short, I ended up in Recovery Mode, successfully ran First Aid in Disk Utility, fixing some minor things, but then I couldn't start up normally. I forget the error messages, but eventually I got a message that said I need to reinstall the macOS on my system. OK, fine, I thought -- let's reinstall Sequoia. But after I initiated the process, I got an error message! Wouldn't reinstall Sequoia. I tried several times, no go.

At this point, I'm tearing my hair out, thinking I'm going to have to buy a new iMac.

But then I tried Internet Recovery Mode and, shockingly, it let me install Tahoe!

All my data was fine. HD passed First Aid with no errors or warnings.

OK, but surely the tradeoff of once again having a working iMac is an eyesore of an OS, a million bugs and new issues, and severely degraded performance, like everyone has been talking about, right?

Nope.

I mean, sure, there are plenty of visual/UI annoyances that make Tahoe's interface seem like an early draft that needs a world of refinement (or outright scraping in some areas), but as far as everyday use and performance? I'm honestly not seeing much, if any, difference from Sequoia. Still snappy, nothing impeding my workflow.

I got about a million and one issues with the Music app (as someone who uses it exclusively for my local library of 4,000+ albums), but it has been a dumpster fire for awhile now -- and yes, even worse on Tahoe.

Of course, individual use varies, so just because it's been fine for me... well, you know.

It is weird, though, how my computer problems ended up forcing me to upgrade. You shady, Apple.
Click to expand...

Which drive do you have on your iMac?

I have an 2019 5K 27 with 64 GB RAM and a 2,5" SSD. It runs on Sequoia but not too snappy, I gues I'll have to swap the SSD for a NVME drive soon, because latest Adobe software is becoming increasingly slower and slower to work with. Especially InDesign, which is nightmare to use (but works flawlessly on my base M5 MBP).
 
With the Xcode 26.4 release Sequoia is no longer supported so I finally installed Tahoe on my 2020 27" Intel iMac. No issues at all and I am not seeing a noticeable performance difference either. UI takes some getting used to though I have been experiencing it on my iPad Pro so not completely new.

System specs 2020 27" iMac with 10 core CPU, 64gb of system RAM, 5700XT GPU with 16GB of video RAM.
 
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