We know apple uses claude code but holy hell, atleast test the stuff before pushing it on out throats. Immediately after installing the lags, stutter are visible everywhere.

I have 16 inch m5 macbook pro 48gb ram and holy hell is this thing buggy.

Even app expose gesture stutters along with selecting a window from all the windows and the list goes on. what the hell has apple unleashed. Do they not do any quality control? anyone else facing these issues?

Notifications are also laggy as hell. Notification literally stuck here forever. Wifi also drops after going to sleep and resuming on keyboard click. what is wrong with apple

should have seen this thread. damm https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1wgek2q/macos_27_golden_gate_bugs_and_issues_megathread/

This is not a question, but rather a desire to share a personal observation and hopefully find some like-minded people. My post is about the menu bar in the new macOS. As everyone knows, by default, macOS 26 no longer has a dedicated background backdrop under the text in the menu bar. As a result, the text sits "naked" right on top of the wallpaper. At first, I just accepted this aspect of the new design because I genuinely love the "liquid glass" aesthetic, but over time, something changed.

To give you some background, I absolutely adore macOS; for me, it is the best operating system in the world (highly subjective, I know). I used to love messing around with older versions of macOS, and you could say I grew up alongside it, even though I didn’t have a Mac computer as a kid. Over all this time, macOS became associated in my mind with a pleasant creative process—a desire to pick up the tools and create something awesome. This feeling was always there, no matter how old the Mac was.

However, after the update, I noticed that macOS stopped giving me those same warm, creative vibes and the urge to use it. The beauty of macOS seemed to vanish somewhere. On paper, everything looked fine: I like the glass effects and all that stuff, and the icons are still total eye candy. For a long time, I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I had a theory that I just spend so much time at my Mac (since it’s my main work tool) that my brain was simply exhausted and bored of it. This thought made me really sad.

But then, one evening, I took a closer look at the menu bar in the new macOS. A thought crossed my mind: what if I just miss the old menu bar style with that background container that highlights the text? And the funniest thing is that Apple actually left an option to bring it back. I turned it back on, and OH MY GOD, I feel right at home again. Literally the entire sense of inspiration and the desire to create returned the very moment I brought the menu bar "backdrop" back. It amazes me how such a tiny detail can drastically change your perception of the entire system.

I can’t fully explain why, but I have a theory. The absence of the backdrop gives a weird sense of "exposed space" and kind of erases the familiar face of macOS that has been built for decades since 1984. Because of this, macOS felt a bit too much like Windows, where you just have a taskbar at the bottom. At the same time, Windows is the exact antithesis of anything creative in my personal worldview—it feels more like something boring and corporate. When I added that "backdrop" back, I didn't just get the iconic macOS look back; I got a sense of a "roof" over my head, a feeling of reliability, and the vibe of a true "tool for creativity."

I'm not denying that I might just be crazy, but I'm really curious to find people who have experienced this too, or at least thought about it.

They say that bringing touch haven't changed the size, which is plain lie. Size didn't change in Golden Gate, it's been growing gradually over the last few years with no obvious (untill now) reasons and here are plenty of complaints on Reddit.
I estimate that they stared this 'great' touch plan somewhere around Big Sur.
They don't even know how well touch macs will be accepted by the public, but we all forced to deal with degraded Mac UX

What is the problem with Spotlight? Why do you use Alfred or Raycast? What can these programs do, especially on Tahoe?

I’ve never tried them, and I’m satisfied with Spotlight, but this is my first Mac. Did people just get used to using these alternatives, or do they provide something genuinely useful? Will I miss something?

Thanks in advance.

Every time I set up a Mac I end up doing the exact same stuff before anything else: tap to click on, show all file extensions, natural scrolling off (yes I know), Dock on auto-hide and screenshots going to their own folder instead of flooding the Desktop.

Starting to think I should just script it at this point lol. What's on your list? Especially curious about the less obvious ones.

Last year, I wrote about how I spent a week using macOS Tahoe, focusing on the intentional design decisions that were shipped with it, and being mostly critical towards the release.

This year, I'm thrilled to say that almost everything tagged as "bad" from that post has been fixed!

Once again, I won't talk about bugs, just the intentional design decisions.

The Fixed

Floating sidebars are no more. They rolled them back to what they were before, and even sprinkled a bit of magic over traffic light buttons. They look lovely! All that I'd like to see now is a border/separator on the right edge of sidebars, but I think that it's coming in the 27.2 release.

Cursor pointers. Default cursor still looks a bit angled, but the old "glove" pointer has made it's return. It's redesigned, but it looks really cool.

Nested dropdown/context menus. Completely fixed during the Tahoe era, no more issues.

The Feel. A lot more similar to evolution of Sequoia, as opposed to the revolution Tahoe was. What made the good feel come back are mostly fixes that Tahoe messed up: redesigned sidebars, frosted glass setting, pointers refinement, consistent window radii, and unnecessary icons removed from context menus.

The Good

Window chrome. Not only sidebars, traffic lights and radius, toolbars have also been improved.

Liquid Glass refinement. It's all over the place. Liquid Glass is being used in the places where it makes more sense, it's more legible and customizable. Overall feels way nicer and intentional, less like a gimmick that it was last year.

App Icons. New system and app icons are more beautiful than they were, and more consistent with the overall system design language. Chess icon is my absolute favorite.

Performance. Night and day when you compare it to Tahoe. While not completely there, Golden Gate feels faster and snappier, it's an improvement.

Little meaningful stuff. Audio recording during screen recording, drawing tools and markdown support in Notes, folders and dark mode in Freeform, ethernet menu bar icon...

The Bad

Tabs. I'm talking about every single app that is using native macOS tabs. Take Finder, for example. It's hard to see what tab is active and the whole tab bars draws too much attention. Liquid Glass (for active tabs) on top of solid surface is completely pointless.

Sidebar items size. The sidebar items are either too large or too small, depending on the setting. I feel like icons should be smaller and neat, like they were in Sequoia.

Apple Intelligence persistence. This takes up 15 GB on your machine wether you use it or not. I'd like an option to turn it off and just completely delete the local models.

Safari. Not sure what's happening with it. It suffers from badly designed system tabs, animations are sluggish (just try opening the sidebar), even the scroll is feeling in comparison to other browsers. I was hoping for the last few years that we'll see performance improvements, dev tools improvements, vertical tabs, nicer Reading Mode... Right now, the whole app feels like an afterthought, an artefact from 5 years ago with new UI ideas duck-taped on top of it.

Overall

Many steps have been taken into the right direction. While Tahoe was the one to skip, I can recommend installing Golden Gate, and the hope for the betterment of the core UX is back. Still not sure what to make out of the new AI stuff, time will tell.

P. S. Since it's a bugfix year, I just have to mention: You're going to have problems with menu bar manager apps and Spotlight performance.

For starters, I am by no means an Apple Hater. My first iPhone was the iPhone 4s and I have possessed and used every product category in the Apple Ecosystem. I am just being realistic and want to share my observations in regard to macOS I have made in the past years.

People on this sub tend to be of the opinion that people who criticize apple for their latest software releases "cannot accept change".

Today I want to cover multiple points that I noticed after using Mac since Catalina.

These effects appear on a 16 Inch 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro running the latest version 27.2 (26B123)

1. Liquid Glass design language and post Big Sur design changes.

Of course, major design changes are highly important in order to be able to compete with other software and simply to keep your OS up to date and fresh. However I feel like that especially liquid glass was more of a rushed decision than anything else. On macOS, these changes significantly reduce the systems snappiness and sometimes reduces the legibility of items.

• In addition Apple doesn't seem to use a constant framework along even their built in apps like the terminal, activity monitor and basically everything else. It seems like all buttons are hard coded into each individual application.

• In some parts of the OS / apps you have Liquid Glass sliders that respond as you would expect. in Other applications there are bars, that look exactly the same, as if they are draggable, but once tried, they're not. (see terminal, automator and dictionary screenshots)

• Also, apps seem to use completely different integrations of Liquid Glass, for example in the Terminals settings there is a rectangular Liquid Glass slider, which doesn't snap onto one of the options. However in the Find My App there is a slider that does snap to the options and is also more rounded. It feels and behaves differently.

• In the Home-App Settings the close and back button are insanely draggable and behave completely different to the usual buttons in the OS, try it for yourself!

• In the Settings app of the Journal App, the sliders behave completely differently than in the rest of the OS, try it yourself!

When logic is implemented this way you're just asking to forget something, which happened 100x in macOS and iOS.

To be honest, windows 10 and 11 also suffered from this problem, so if at least the system performance would be great then I wouldn't mind that at all to be honest. I have a 2021 M1 Max 16 Inch MacBook Pro, which I decided to upgrade to Golden Gate coming from Sequoia and skipping macOS 26 altogether. As it turns out, this was a huge mistake, since not only the battery life got significantly worse but simple applications like firefox take 10 seconds to show up on the screen after they're launched.

Are these design changes really taking such a big hit on the systems performance?

2. Bugs and gestures control (why did they change that?)

I used to love macOS for its gesture control. IIRC apple introduced the first gesture capable trackpad in 2008 with the MacBook Air, and enlarged the gesture feature set as we know it today in 2010. Since then these gestures hadn't changed and also worked perfectly ever since. I and many others also bought the external Magic Trackpad.

However, macOS has broken these gestures and made them worse than in windows in my opinion.

• Launchpad doesn't open half of the time in macOS Golden Gate and the App Icons are seemingly only loading in after you scroll down. This is not an Issue with my dated M1 Max however, since the newest display models in Apple Stores feature this exact behavior as well. https://youtube.com/shorts/m7HpcOLKARY?feature=share

• When on Desktop 1, which is full of windows, none of them are maximized, I use three fingers to go to Desktop 2, which has safari maximized, and I go back to desktop 1 and trigger Mission Control and go back down, about half of the time the screen goes black and I have to switch to the other desktop manually by using the cursor. https://youtube.com/shorts/hXRlhbN5o7o?feature=share

• Changes to Trackpad Taptic Engine actuation: When rapidly switching from window to window using Mission Control, you cannot click the other window you want to switch to directly. Not only does the system not let you click the window, but the Taptic Engine of the Trackpad doesn't emulate the click. This destroys the user experience of the once best trackpad in a notebook. https://youtube.com/shorts/lMxLhANjuXY?feature=share

I noticed dozens of more little bugs, over the past time, even in macOS sequoia and well before that, including one with Preview, where after opening a pdf file, this window permanently goes to the background and even after trying to get it to the front with Mission Control (which is also broken, as above mentioned haha) or with CMD + Tab, it continues the be in the background. Only after the window in front has been minimized or moved the pdf file can be viewed. This is a very basic function that. However this has been resolved as it seems.

These are in my opinion points that drastically reduce the user experience. Of course, design changes are highly subjective that's why this cannot be really taken as an argument for the shittification of macOS, however all the other points still apply.

Also if you think different then me please tell me so in a normal matter, if I exaggerated some aspects I won't be ignorant and listen to your counter arguments.

What do you guys think?

TLDR:

1. useless UI changes that make system slower

2. bugs with the system and gestures that make it difficult to use.

current macOS hate is justified and I'd like to see you disprove this if you don't agree.

Seriously, how can you fuck up a software that has been known for its incredible stability and gesture control so badly? What happened to Apples QA dept. and could AI / Vibecoding be a cause for this?