But having used it for a few weeks now I can confirm it is a strict downgrade over Sequoia for me. I use none of the new features it has introduced, and the changes to existing features are just worse.
Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro. The Finder has gone from fine to janky once again, especially with horizontal scroll. The window corners and mouse interactions are indeed annoying (I'd assumed the many complaints were at least slight hyperbole). Left-aligned window titles are unbalanced and ugly. I've had weird (visual) app duplication issues with the Application smart-folder in the Dock. Cross-device copy-paste SEEMS to be more flaky than usual. And most petty of all I really don't like the new icons - especially the Trash icon for some reason.
I wiped my computer and reinstalled Sequoia last week.
On an M4 Pro! Pure planned obsecelence. Noticed it regularly with major MacOS releases. Nothing will convince me otherwise.
Just wanted to comment to see if I can help answer any questions as well as mentioning that we improved the instructions in the README based on some of the points Rob made a few weeks back.
There really are a large number of us out there that know Tahoe would be a downgrade to their current setup
If you have any ideas on how to improve the resilience of the workarounds, please connect on the GitHub, or just starring the repo would help, as the project would get more attention and hopefully more solutions offered as a result.
It's frustrating to feel like your computer isn't.. yours anymore when you're pushed so insistently like with this "upgrade". Hopefully we can figure out some sustainable ways to get some autonomy back.
But I can't think of a single animation that added a delay to processing on MacOS.
Compare to say, Windows, at least.
I like new and shiny software, but these two releases aren't great. Outside of a good amount of bugs. It is wild to me that Apple can't even get their own UI consistent.
Apples own apps are pretty much the only things you can't close. Finder: can't quit. System settings, somehow doesn't expand horizontally (are we still in the 2000s apple?) I haven't felt the liquid glass or whatever too much on the laptop, but I just used one of my family members Iphone today, and man it was distracting, it seems crazy that contrast has gone out the window.
But especially the bugs. Apple should really take a release that is just bug fixing. I had to switch out Spotlight because it kept trying to want to index my entire system, which is hard when you work in both Rust and typescript projects (lots of small files).
defaults write com.apple.SoftwareUpdate MajorOSUserNotificationDate -date "2030-03-03 12:00:00 +0000"I setup a focus for do not disturb that runs from 12am to 11:59pm every Day.
Have not seen the popup on 4 weeks since I set it up
Linux + KDE surpassed Windows many years ago, now I find I also prefer it to the Mac laptops, which are otherwise better only for portability.
Apple need to get their software act together. Such a shame because the hardware is awesome. A near perfect inversion of the era of Tiger on the G4.
[BIG Warning: this didn't work for child commenter]
- simply decline/reject the TOS on install. It will auto uninstall the installer and go away.
Life has been good since.
> As a rule of thumb, Macs will not run any version of macOS older than the one they shipped with when they launched. Apple provides security updates for older versions of macOS, but it doesn’t bother backporting drivers and other hardware support from newer versions to older ones.
So the answer is “no”, they probably won’t be able to downgrade on the models that are about to be released.
Tahoe is still a breath of fresh air compared to Windows, and iOS 26 is still great compared to Android (as I've unfortunately learned from a failed switch attempt).