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Thoughts on upgrading to Tahoe
- Thread starter PhysicsClubReject
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It's not optimized for Intel at all, I would avoid for now. It runs horribly on my Intel MP (see specs in quote). I also have a 2019 MBP which I don't really use, and upgraded to Tahoe and it runs horribly.
So just to be clear, it runs horribly on a 2019 Mac Pro with 192GB of DDR4 RAM. How much VRAM does your video card have, 16GB?
What good enhancements does it have? Not a rhetorical question, I am genuinely curious and have seen nothing mentioned.
System is more than fast enough to run fine, it's a professional work station. Worked great under Sequoia. I'm not the only one with these issues on Intel. 16GB for VRAM on a very capable GPU. Faster than anything Apple offers even the M3 Ultra.
I haven't encountered more bugs in Tahoe than I did in Sequoia and I suspect the current bugs to be worked out in time. I do find some Tahoe bugs to be so shocking because their nature exposes Apple's poor testing practices; I didn't see that so clearly in earlier OS releases.
The UI changes are of a different nature. The problem with them is that it won't help you completely to not upgrade to Tahoe. Applications will upgrade to Liquid Glass and various aspects of that will also affect those applications if they run on Sequoia.
On aspect of the LG revamp that annoys me in particular is the decision to extend sidebars to the top, pushing into the toolbar and window controls area. An application I use heavily released their Liquid Glass version recently. The Sequoia version of the upgrade dodged some of the bullets - the window corners are rounded with the traditional curvature and there is no exaggerated translucency - just the subtle one that Sequoia uses. However, the right and left sidebars of the app on Sequoia extend into the title bar and window controls area. The new application's toolbar doesn't extend into the sidebars as it would on Tahoe, so tons useable space is wasted. Also, where the application previously had a title bar, this has been removed - probably motivated by trying to adhere to overarching LG practices.
In Tahoe, Apple provided exemplars like Finder and Preview, which other application developers will mimic. Those exemplars set patterns that work strongly against my interests. Even if you don't upgrade, you are still at the mercy of the developers whose applications you count on. If they only did a good job before because they were following Apple's lead, then you are still at Apple's mercy while running Sequoia.
The UI changes are of a different nature. The problem with them is that it won't help you completely to not upgrade to Tahoe. Applications will upgrade to Liquid Glass and various aspects of that will also affect those applications if they run on Sequoia.
On aspect of the LG revamp that annoys me in particular is the decision to extend sidebars to the top, pushing into the toolbar and window controls area. An application I use heavily released their Liquid Glass version recently. The Sequoia version of the upgrade dodged some of the bullets - the window corners are rounded with the traditional curvature and there is no exaggerated translucency - just the subtle one that Sequoia uses. However, the right and left sidebars of the app on Sequoia extend into the title bar and window controls area. The new application's toolbar doesn't extend into the sidebars as it would on Tahoe, so tons useable space is wasted. Also, where the application previously had a title bar, this has been removed - probably motivated by trying to adhere to overarching LG practices.
In Tahoe, Apple provided exemplars like Finder and Preview, which other application developers will mimic. Those exemplars set patterns that work strongly against my interests. Even if you don't upgrade, you are still at the mercy of the developers whose applications you count on. If they only did a good job before because they were following Apple's lead, then you are still at Apple's mercy while running Sequoia.
I can understand; the bad interface stuff upstaged everything.
Off the top of my head:
• Spotlight is the big one, with a number of fixes, some reorganization, and powerful shortcuts stuff. (Unfortunately I was affected by a huge bug until 26.1 that disabled file search, and the "apps" view killed the much lovelier Launchpad, so "enhancement" is already debatable. But the new features are at least there.)
• iPhone integration brings Live Activities to the menu bar (pretty cool), and the call screening stuff from iOS is available from the Mac.
• Not really an enhancement, but Web apps at least use the compact window title bar and still honour the app's theme colour, which is a halfway-tolerable native look for Tahoe.
• Control Center gets the customizability and the dozens upon dozens of new controls that iOS had. You can add individual controls, or pages of controls, arbitrarily to the menu, including things like toggles for individual HomeKit-connected devices. Very convenient if you have them.
• Shortcuts has new intelligence-based actions, which have struck me as perhaps the first actually exciting manifestation of Apple Intelligence for regular users. (Not enough for me, but the new feature is at least there.)
• A bunch of new Background Sounds options for ambient noise. Great stuff.
• Options for light, dark, clear and tinted app icons. (The unpleasant specular edges are the one thing you can't customize, but even the "dark" option is welcome.)
• The fully transparent menu bar is probably nice for people who don't like the opaqueness and don't want to fully hide it.
• Folder icons are pretty nice with a new appearance and animations, and they can be easily customized with colours that match the existing tags, along with whatever emoji.
• Being a developer, there are also a lot of new or improved APIs suggesting to me that the people conceiving and implementing the actual "how it works" are still there.
• We have a native central Games app. You know, they're still trying. I suppose.
I'm sure there's more. For those immune to the interface, those are all potential plusses for certain people.
I appreciate the list. I didn't even realize Tahoe had background sounds. I can't get them to Airplay to my HomePod, but I'm trying it now and enjoying it through my laptop speakers. I also see that I can now control a particular device with control center that I previously couldn't manage with a widget.
I never use spotlight. Your bringing it up will motivate me to play with it some. I use LaunchBar / DEVONthink for the kind of things I would use spotlight for. I'm going to look at spotlight and see what I might be missing.
I have enjoyed the better iPhone integration. That's not insignificant to me.
Some things you mention that I would really enjoy don't apply to my usage:
I really enjoyed the transparent menu bar. But I've decided to use the "Reduce transparency" setting to fix some sidebar issues. That setting turns the menubar solid black. Oh well.
I've replaced Finder with QSpace, so I don't benefit from the Folder icons. Oh well. Now and again I look at Finder to review some of its bugs and I do find the icons really, really nice when I do that. (I'll admit that was a bit of a dig at Finder.)
Thanks for the list. There really are some good upgrades.
Hey, someone does appreciate some of those things. ^ ^
I wouldn't have scoured my mind if ADGrant hadn't asked, so thank them.
On background sounds:
I tried, and enabling background sounds by simply routing system audio to a HomePod seems to work fine. I suppose you were hoping to specially route background sounds to a HomePod while retaining the rest of the system audio, and I can't think of an easy way to do that.
The HomePod has independently supported ambient background sounds for some time, but I don't think it includes all those new ones yet.
There's so many memory leaks in WindowServer and GPU/CPU spikes for no apparent reason, even simple things such as opening a Finder window takes too many cpu/memory cycles. Pretty shoddy code from Apple's part.
I haven't investigated that at all. I do have 96 GB of RAM and reboot every morning. Even massive leaks might go unnoticed.
I don't want to overstate the Finder issues since I don't use it, but there are two obvious bugs in it. I talked a little about it here:
I don't know if the number of bugs in Tahoe is more than any other release (per unit of functionality, which is increasing all the time), but the nature of the Finder bugs is a bit different. Finder was not put through some very basic testing because it would have been impossible to miss the bugs. Not being able to resize columns when the horizontal scrollbar appears is astonishing. The testers, even if they had exercised column view, only gave it a casual look. I think this article is worth a read to give you a sense the state of affairs.
and one quote in the article:
"Thus, it appears that the Finder team did not even test with the combination of columns view and always show scroll bars. Or if they did test, Apple did not care that it was broken."
I suspect they didn't test. Considering Finder was an application they did convert to Liquid Glass, and knew people would use it as an example to mimic, that it is buggy is a smoking gun for poor testing. So inefficiencies as you describe wouldn't surprise me.
The call screening is a great new feature for iOS and having Windows and menubar on apps is a significant enhancement for iPadOS. Nothing on that list seems that compelling except perhaps the phone app for some.
Again, appreciate all the info.
When I had system audio routed to the HomePod, the background sounds played briefly then stopped. After that the system started glitching a bit when I tried to choose outputs. Apple does not handle unexpected interactions with external devices gracefully.
I've played a bit with spotlight. It does seem quite nice what they are trying to do. It's a bit buggy for me. The selection of grid/list usually doesn't work.
Spotlight is an interesting case study. It's telling that an advertised featured of Tahoe, the upgrades to Spotlight, were not well tested. I suppose there's a chance it's just an unintuitive UI that's causing user error. For a short while, during my testing, I thought the grid/list selection only applied to application view, because it seemed to work there. But then that stopped working there for me as well.
Is the grid/list selection in Spotlight buggy for anyone else?
I've experienced at least the odd glitch with the grid view toggle. I agree it's an ambitious feature upgrade that – like many initial versions of new features – will be refined.
We've been talking mainly about enhancements. With Tahoe, the list of interface oddities and even garishnesses, and the bugs that come with them, is one of the biggest lists ever; hence this thread and others like it.
(I don't suppose you've tried to use the Contacts app in Tahoe yet…?)
My thoughts on the Contacts app can be read here: