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Tahoe Adoption rate

maflynn said:
Oh no question, I've mentioned earlier in the thread Tahoe, is lagging behind Sequoia, still its no where near as dire as people make it out to be
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Yep, not meant to be a critique, just adding context. I just recently spent some time trawling around archive.org to capture the historical numbers (Steam only shows the current month, and TelemetryDeck only shows the most recent 12 months), so I have them readily available.

Tahoe isn't seeing the most slow adoption rate ever. It's actually above where Ventura was at this time in the cycle. For the slowest, since Apple switched to yearly releases, that honor appears to go to macOS 10.15 Catalina, which makes sense I guess because dropping 32-bit app support led to more hesitation than Liquid Glass is.
 
Adoption has slowed significantly between February and March. We're just over the 60 percent mark, where as February was just at that threshold
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Very interesting and thank you for pulling this data together.

I think generally those who are having issues have downgraded. My mum and sister on the other hand, they've got very little idea on how to open terminal and create a bootable disk - so for them, whilst their OS is buggy as hell, their options are to simply continue to update with hopes and prayers that the next .1 removes bugs (or ask me to do it for them).

I too was in that camp, thinking that .3 would solve my issues, it didn't so the downgrade was for me.

However, as much as I want "apple to list" I always wonder if we're in a bit of an echo chamber (by we i mean my brothers and sisters on macrumours) surely we dont account for more than 30-40% of "adopters", and by we I also mean those using Tahoe who are annoyed with the OS, and have the knowledge and willpower to do sth about it.
 
Numbers from Steam hardware survey show a bigger spike in Tahoe adoption in February than we see from Telemetry Deck. Tahoe went from 62.2% in January to 78.7% in February. ...There can be fluctuations, so take that with a grain of salt.

For reference, according to Steam hardware survey, Sequoia had 90.2% adoption at this point one year ago, and Sonoma had virtually 100% adoption at this point two years ago. So, despite the "spike", Tahoe is still lagging behind its immediate predecessors.

———

I still haven't upgraded yet, but right now I am thinking that 26.5 (late May?) will be when I bite the bullet. I will still be keeping an eye on adoption and prevalent bug reports between now and then, though, and I might change my opinion...

Despite my complaints about the visual style, for me the issue holding me back is more around bugs/stability than the new design. The mid-cycle releases (March/April "X.4") tend to be more risky, as Apple tends to introduce their last batch of major changes at that time, before fully shifting focus to "fixes only", and "the next major macOS release" ahead of WWDC. Last year (15.4) we had them breaking Canon RAW photos in some apps, and the year before (14.4) was particularly disruptive with them breaking a number of Java apps, USB hubs, and printers.

If the betas for 26.4 are any indication, they are still mucking around with things; 26.4 beta 1 broke auto-mounting HFS+ volumes and 26.4 beta 2 has created networking breakage for people who have any network filters installed (Little Snitch, VPN apps, etc.). Both of these issues were fixed in the subsequent beta release. I hope that they get this in a stable spot before the final release of 26.4, but I still think that I myself will be waiting for one more after that.
 
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Or at this point maybe just wait for 27 unless you’re on an Intel Mac and want to give Tahoe a spin. I didn’t skip any OS from Leopard to Sierra. Then skipped High Sierra, skipped Catalina, skipped Monterey and Ventura. My remaining active 2019 15” MBP tops out on Sequoia but my 2019 16” Intel MBP (before I sold it) ran Tahoe, but with noticeable GUI stutters and sluggishness. Tahoe was fine on the M5 I returned, so expecting the M5 Pro I have on order to run it just fine. It won’t fix Music or Contacts, but that’s a whole different set of issues.
 
conmee said:
Or at this point maybe just wait for 27
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This has occurred to me...

I'm hoping that the rumors about the 27 series of OS's being a stability/clean-up release (a la "Snow Leopard") but I am not taking for granted that they will be "good" out of the gate, until I start seeing real people's reactions.

However, there is no way that I upgrade to 27 right at launch, no matter how good it "seems". Waiting gives time for Apple to fix early bugs, third-party devs to make needed adjustments, and for the community to build up a knowledge base of "solutions to issues". On the last point, I used to enjoy being part of that process, but given where my life is at right now, I'd just as soon wait for people who have more time to figure that stuff out.

It's true that macOS Tahoe doesn't offer any new features that especially appeal to me... except for one. I'm annoyed every time that I get a spam text, that it gets filtered on my phone but not my Mac. So I will be upgrading to Tahoe at least for that, sometime before 27 drops. But if 27 shakes out well, I won't be waiting as long to upgrade to it as I have waited to upgrade to Tahoe.
 
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Looks like things have improved somewhat, Tahoe has about 70% of macos marketshare - by this one exhibit. I don't know if the final week of March is an aberration (by going down), but we'll see once this chart is updated next month.

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Apple now offers the update even to Macs that had a profile installed to avoid it (originally for 90 days, but Apple waited until 26.4 to offer it).
 
I was curious how Tahoe compares to Sequoia over the same period last year, and I’m surprised by how close macOS 15 is to macOS 26. As noted above, Tahoe is tracking at around (or just over) 70%, while Sequoia was at 80% last year. Honestly, I expected a bigger gap between the two.

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I wonder if the rumors of 27 being a 'fix things under the hood' release are affecting the adoption of 26.

For me personally, 26 doesn't introduce any features that matter, so I figure I might as well wait around for 27 and hope Apple can clean up some of their mess.
 
I don't mind Liquid Glass on the Mac, but the choppy animations are a little jarring considering I have 24GB of unified memory. It's a little shocking to see coming from Windows, which is relatively smooth. I'm sure it's something that can be fixed, but I'm surprised it's still there 26 releases in.
 
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Likely 26.4.1 I'll make the leap. No problems at all on Sequoia, and I have no issue with Liquid Glass on iPhone/iPad, so it's probably time to make the jump.

Can always jump back through Time Machine if needed I suppose.
 
boswald said:
choppy animations are a little jarring
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And weirdly, some animations that are normally smooth (120 fps) will sometimes get capped at a low rate (30 or 60 fps) until you quit and re-open the application. Makes "ProMotion" a bit of a joke sometimes when you can see stutter in so many places.
 
01cowherd said:
And weirdly, some animations that are normally smooth (120 fps) will sometimes get capped at a low rate (30 or 60 fps) until you quit and re-open the application. Makes "ProMotion" a bit of a joke sometimes when you can see stutter in so many places.
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I know I wouldn't be happy if I invested in a ProMotion display and noticed those. I have a mere 60hz screen (which is fine for me) and I still notice them, so they're definitely prominent enough for anyone to see them. It's odd since macOS is supposed to be more optimized than Windows.
 
On the Steam side, for April we have Tahoe at 83.8% and Sequoia at 16.2%.
That's a shift up of about 8% for Tahoe from the month before.
One year ago, Sequoia was at 89.5%.
 
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