macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess | Hacker News Reader

macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess

squareorbits.com

472 pointsSquareOrbits348 comments

It’s been a strict improvement on my computers, which isn’t to say that the author isn’t having problems, just that theirs (or mine!) isn’t the universal experience.

And they’ve finally fixed some annoying, long-endured audio bugs: https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2026/09/24/macos-27-fixes-mul...

They surely fixed a lot of bugs, but not enough, and they added so many new stupid ones. Mission Control wasn't perfect before, but at least it wasn't buggy. Now there is a bug every two clicks.

Even double-clicking in Finder is broken, many times double-clicks are just ignored.

Thank you for this; this has been driving me nuts the past week and it never once occurred to me it might be a genuine issue with the new OS and not my double-click muscles beginning to fail.

I cant drag and drop any more in finder somehow. it was working fine, now it works and then i have to restart or it is not working at all. what a mess

Occasionally drag'n'drop failures —where it just stops working— I experienced already with Yosemite, so it may be a VERY old bug. :) Usually you would see "CoreDragError" codes popping up in the system.log

Rather than rebooting, I just kill "pboard" in Activity Monitor, and afterwards restart a few GUI programs that were directly affected (including Finder and Dock.)

My wild theory is that Firefox is the culprit. At least the issues happened more frequently once I had to switch to Firefox for proper content blocking extensions. Anyway… I have no idea how to prove that, so it's just a guess, not a blame.

Well, I've been sitting on Sequoia this whole time, because I decided to sit Tahoe out, based on what I heard on HN. Maybe I'll sit Golden Gate out too!

same! will stay on Sequoia. Liquid Glass is so ugly

I’m going to express what seems to be an unpopular opinion and say that I actually quite like Liquid Glass. It reminds me a bit of the Aqua design language, which made me quite envious back when I was using Win98SE.

Many people have complained about how hard it is to find a safe place to grab windows in Tahoe when you want to move them, though, and I absolutely agree with that complaint.

Same here: 15.8. I'm still running Intel Macs. Homebrew is out, Macports are in. Xcode 26.3. Everything else works just fine with a bit of patching (e.g Vagrant).

My favorite thing they broke is that there is no longer an animation when launching and dismissing Spotlight in its Launchpad mode (i.e 4 finger pinch on trackpad). I mean there is an animation, but it's only visible if I'm pinching slowly. If I do it at normal speed, there's just a half-second delay and then it pops in or out.

I suspect they made the animation so heavy that it reaches its deadline before it even starts, so it gets skipped.

Not sure if it's better or worse than Tahoe, where the animation (mostly) worked but app icons either popped in all at once a bit later or were rendered one by one from top-left to bottom-right.

It's such a buggy mess. When using my Mac these days I miss the polish of my Linux desktop.

> When using my Mac these days I miss the polish of my Linux desktop.

Just highlighting this sentence.

He must mean the language :)

With how easy it is to vibe code everything Apple’s walled garden days are numbered

I use the "Switch to Desktop N" keyboard shortcuts for Mission Control, bound to Ctrl + 1–4, and those shortcuts constantly break in Golden Gate. Usually it only allows me to do Ctrl + 1 for the first desktop, and 2–4 do nothing.

Thankfully you can fix them by running `killall Dock`, until they break again an hour later.

The Finder bug is very annoying.

they may have fixed audio bugs but it broke ableton was my main complaint.

They didn't fix one pretty big audio bug (or possibly introduced it?) which bit me the other day: I attempted to use an aggregate audio device consisting of the headphone jack and a USB audio interface. Randomly every few minutes, the outputs would get rearranged and my audio would get routed to the wrong places. It was definitely the aggregate device, since it hasn't happened again since I switched to just the USB interface.

Golden gate has been ok-ish for me. I am more annoyed by the constant render stutters in iOS. It got worse with iOS 26 (tested on iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air) and it is still pretty bad with iOS 27 (tested on iPhone Air and iPhone 18 Pro).

Some apps like the App Store or Mastodon are a complete stutter fest, even when you let them preload all assets. But it even happens in very basic apps like the Settings app.

Meanwhile my woefully underpowered Pixel 10 Pro (on par with a flagship from a few years ago) with GrapheneOS is butter smooth in nearly every app.

I don't know, there are definitely some rough edges (particularly with the menu bar for some reason - big rewrite there?), but overall I'm quite happy with Golden Gate. "Buggy mess" is some serious hyperbole.

Of the issues they report:

- The centering bugs seem... not very important.

- The Mac User Guide looks fine to me. Shows "for macOS 27."

- Network app?

- Why are you looking at the Mission Control app icon at 20x zoom? And in any case, doesn't it seem reasonable to simplify the traffic light design to a flat circle for an icon that will be displayed very small 99.9% of the time?

- Firefox bugs are bugs in Firefox. (I also keep experiencing the stuck menu bug, but again, Firefox bug.)

- "You can find references to NeXTSTEP, the ancestor of macOS, in its UI!" No, that's not what that means.

- "I have a folder open in the Dock. If I click on another folder, shouldn't that then open?" Yes, and it does.

- The rest, sure.

What does the NS prefix mean?

NeXTSTEP. Grandparent is wrong.

Search this document for "Historical Note" for the canonical explanation:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

That it's a symbol in a Cocoa framework :)

NS hasn't had anything to do with NeXTSTEP since, well, NeXTSTEP. The author's wording makes it sound like this is some crazy remnant of forgotten 30-year-old code poking through, but it's really not. It's Swift (most likely) string concatenation being passed a view instance instead of a string by mistake.

That’s kind of a weird take. It’s perfectly reasonable that Apple has not attempted to yank all the “NS” references out, but they are absolutely a holdover from NeXTSTEP. That NeXTSTEP no longer exists does not change that.

The convention is a holdover. It does not mean that the code is the same. There’s plenty of NS classes that did not exist before OS X.

I didn’t say the code is the same. I said it’s incorrect to say that “ns” has nothing to do with NeXTSTEP.

Even funnier, there's new ones added for Liquid Glass that still reference NS: NSGlassEffectView

What would you say the letters NS stand for? Perhaps "Not Standforanything"?

Firefox UI bugs are crazy. For example, on Tahoe 26.5, you can select disabled control menu items: https://imgur.com/a/7VUHzLK

Anywhere else on macOS, you can't do that. Even better, you can activate them with Enter.

Interesting, that one actually seems to be fixed on Golden Gate.

iirc these aren’t native menus. Firefox builds their own. I found this out when scratching my head why I couldn’t find “Look Up” in the right click menu in Firefox.

Oh, hyperbole and a half. It's a useable OS.

- Centring _is_ important! How dare you!

- Same for me now. Wasn't when I used it a few days ago.

- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

- Very pedantic, I know. But look at some of the other icons close up, lots contain tiny details very few ever see (try the Mail app, the icon of a text file, or the loupe on the old Preview icon). That obsessive attention to detail feels like it's now in the past.

- Yeah could well be Firefox's fault. But it surfaced in Golden Gate, so I included it.

- You can trace anything NS* back to NeXTSTEP

- Not for me!

- :)

The centering bugs are important. They show attention to detail. Humans are wired to see such sloppiness as indicative of deeper problems. If they can’t get the easy stuff right, it saps your trust that they got the harder stuff right.

Apple built their entire brand around this ethos, and being willing and able to execute it better than any other brand. Letting it slip undermines the Apple brand, which is the entire company.

They built this brand for hardware, but, personally, I’ve never had this opinion of their software. I mean, being Unix based is better than Windows, but they’ve always been cooking weird UI refreshes or buggy software.

It’s crazy because they have (or had) something like $100bn in cash. Spending 0.5% of that per year on software (development, bug-fixing, performance, and QA) would help tremendously. They’d be insurmountable.

I know “they don’t have to”, but they don’t have to do a lot of things that they do on the hardware side. They choose to.

> Spending 0.5% of that per year on software (development, bug-fixing, performance, and QA) would help tremendously. They’d be insurmountable.

Doesn't really help:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Also, "bug fixing" tends to add new bugs - any kind of change can cause regressions. It's quite difficult.

This is a little simplistic. Investing more in the quality component of the org - valuable.

TM3 is basically "if this is your approach to shipping sooner / more quickly, then you're going to have a bad time." It's not a solution for a delayed project. It's not "you shouldn't invest more in the infrastructure of a large project" (or at least not blindly).

It is valuable if you do it right, but it's difficult.

I've been promoting a specific aspect of performance quality recently, but it's mostly lead to other teams creating tests to monitor it that don't really make sense (along the lines of "if you use the computer it'll make the CPU % go up"), asking me to look at it, and then when I say it's probably fine I get a response along the lines of "it must be important because we already told all the executives about it."

>Doesn't really help:

That's just a classic software development book. What makes its lessons scientific fact?

Also, it's about a singular project that's late.

Not necessarily applicable to dozens of projects with understuffed teams. Adding people to such teams to help, and assigning new people to look and fix bugs nobody cares about now because they're overworked on some "flagship" new features, is a different case.

If they can’t get stuff you think is easy right, it saps your trust that they got the things you think are harder right.

Centering is not easy. Apparently. It requires human eye to verify. I can prove my decryption algorithm works. I can’t prove centering works.

> Firefox bugs are bugs in Firefox. (I also keep experiencing the stuck menu bug, but again, Firefox bug.)

Glitches in context menus could theoretically be just Firefox bugs. Glitches in the global menu bar can't be just Firefox bugs. Those pixels don't belong to Firefox. It shouldn't be possible for an application to cause the OS to lose track of which menu the user has open in the global menu bar. Even if Firefox is buggy here (quite likely), there's clearly a deficiency in the OS itself, too.

The menus, and what happens when you open/close them, do belong to Firefox. Cocoa gives apps a fair amount of power here. In Firefox's case, the issue is likely because each window specifies its own independent set of menu bar menus - very un-macOS - and it handles that by destroying and recreating the global menu bar every time you switch windows. The stuck menu bug seems to happen when a window is opened or closed, so my guess would be that something about the destroy-and-recreate routine is broken on macOS 27.

If Firefox isn't responsible for rendering the menu bar, then Firefox doesn't own the menu bar. It sounds like what you're describing is a process where Firefox tells the OS what items it wants the OS to put in the menu bar. Whether or not the app provides a new set of top-level menu entries during a window switch, it still seems to be entirely the responsibility of the OS to actually manage the rendering and respond to user interaction, including the OS keeping track of which top-level menu should be rendered as selected, and the OS should be enforcing that there's only zero or one selected menu.

I think you may have a poor mental model of how GUI apps work, at least on macOS. Perhaps you’re confused because the menu bar looks to be a global OS element, when in reality it’s as much the responsibility of the app as an OS where the menu bar is visually drawn inside the app window.

Even if the OS “renders” the menu or “owns the pixels”, it’s still being driven by procedural code within the app in order to create those menus. This is not some declarative spec that apps just hand off and wipe their hands of. The app “owns” the menu bar, it just uses OS libraries to help with it.

If the app code misbehaves or doesn’t follow the API contract, it’s completely possible to have bugs with the menus. For example, if an app just deadlocks, the menu bar hangs with a spinning beach ball the same as any other GUI element drawn inside a window. Switching to another app will cause the menu bar to work (because that other app is now rendering the menu bar), but it will remain frozen if you switch back to the frozen app.

> "I have a folder open in the Dock. If I click on another folder, shouldn't that then open?" Yes, and it does.

Look at their gif carefully. Enable Dock magnification, click one folder, then click on any part of another folder's icon for which the click/cursor would no longer be on that folder's hitbox after the magnification effect moves to center that folder.

> Why are you looking at the Mission Control app icon at 20x zoom?

Apple used to. Scott Forstall famously used a photographer's loupe to inspect the UIs Apple was putting out.

> particularly with the menu bar for some reason - big rewrite there?

This bothers me. Why would you rewrite the menu bar, something that works?!

I keep seeing new kinds of menu items in macOS. The menu for Focus mode is completely different in rendering than the menu for Wifi, say. Surely (I think to myself) all these should be inbuilt system menus -- that is, reusable shared code -- that are consistent? Or is macOS just getting rewritten, ad hoc yet wholesale, half the UI custom not system?

Yesterday, I tried to fill out a PDF on a MacOS laptop. It was very rough.

I've been a longtime Linux user, but one of the nice things about MacOS is that it comes out of the box with software for common file formats. I remember being a bit happy to skip the step where I search "best pdf editor linux".

This was true in 2022, when I started using MacOS. Around that time, people were complaining about a battery icon that was too skeumorphic or something, which is so trite in comparison to the avalanche of problems today.

But, geeze, it's rough to edit a PDF on MacOS today. The built-in PDF editor has a weird flow to add text (rather than clicking where you want to place the text, you click a button which summons a box with the text "Text" in an arbitrary position on your PDF). You have to click and drag the Text textbox to the position you want it to be in.

Every part of the UI is broken, though. You have to discover this by clicking (all icons, no text), you have to move the textbox by finding the 1px wide click-and-drag target (on a high-DPI display!), and sometimes, the text simply disappears and deletes itself, in a way no amount of cmd+Z (undo) can fix.

It's very frustrating and crazy-making, but the amount of time it took to fill out one page of a PDF precludes me from wanting to take the effort to document it in this way.

So, I very very much appreciate this author for sharing a few of the million papercuts of MacOS. It is really hard to imagine someone being proud of putting this product out.

Papercuts, that's a neat way of describing them. Thanks for that!

Was it a poorly-authored PDF without fields? You’d be SOL entirely on Windows in that situation. I find Preview’s PDF editing pretty intuitive generally.

I also like that Preview gets page numbers right in complex documents like textbooks. If a problem set is on page 89 (which might be the 115th actual page), I can just go to it. I’ve yet to see any other free or built in PDF reader do that.

Okular (KDE) and Evince (GNOME) both do.

You should try to add comments with that built-in editor. You can spend hours of writing the comments, and then suddenly, some comment gets corrupted and it removes all existing comments. All work gone. You can't trust that tool.

If the PDF doesn't contain form completion elements you have to use the "painting / diagramming mode" to add annotations. However, I often find the "form enabled" PDFs to have horribly mis-aligned boxes with odd choices for fonts and inconsistent behavior (check marks or choices for example).

I do agree that the annotation feature isn't like Omnigraffle or draw.io diagramming apps that are based around a mouse; the interface does seem more suitable for a touch (pad, screen). You choose an object to add, then get to move it into place rather than selecting an object to add and then use the mouse to place and size it. The annotation feature also works in a very similar way on an iPad / iPhone.

If you tap (click) and /hold/ anywhere in the hit zone of an object the cursor will move to a hand and you can move it anywhere. For a text box, the hit zone it is almost anywhere on the text - yup, it is more awkward if you delete all the text! The resize / reshape hit zones for objects are centered around the "dots" when the object is active. A single tap (click) will edit text.

I am not sure what is happening when things disappear and cmd-Z doesn't undo, I've not experienced that.

This markup feature is also available when annotating image attachments in email.

It would be nice to be able to group more than a single set of objects and keep them grouped.

I've used the annotation feature quite a lot to highlight errors in web pages and give sequence instructions on how to do something on a poorly designed site.

Honestly I think you're just doing it wrong. Messing with PDF's is probably one of the coolest built in features I know of, and with Markup etc in Preview it's super easy.

Be careful of PDF's with built in broken fields though, in which case I just add a text field on top if it's easier.

You see this pattern a lot around Apple users where they insist there simply can't be bugs in Apple software. It's really counterproductive and it's part of the "crazymaking" element of interacting with Apple software and Apple's fanbase.

There should be nothing "wrong" I can do which makes text disappear which can't be undone, or where the click-and-drag targets are as tiny as can be.

The program is buggy. Apple releases bad software sometimes. That is simply all there is to it.

Okay, I'll bite. Also see my other comment.

You said "mouse", is it a gaming mouse? Is it configured to issue a bazillion clicks if you press and hold "left" button - for a stupidly small number of ms, taking no consideration of you if you are playing a game? Does it also send "wiggler" (WASD) keyboard presses at the same time? Either of these will ruin any chance of you doing "undo", unless you also "undo" a bazillion times. This behavior will likely make a lot of other things behave in quite weird ways and be "slow" to respond. If you've got a gaming mouse doing auto-clicks, auto-kbd strokes for non-game apps, then the UI designed for humans is going to behave weirdly.

FWIW, the placeholder text can never really disappear, if you remove it all, you get the placeholder "Text" back again. You can replace it with a single space, but that also has a hit zone of more than 1px both H & V. Maybe you have found a bug. I do think there are issues with font background / foreground colour selection that might make it "invisible", but the hit zone will still be there.

I use an ancient mouse, "Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 1000" and an Apple Trackpad. I cannot reproduce what you describe.

What mouse are you using? What additional HID (Mouse, KBD) extensions do you have installed?

It's pretty unusual for even gaming mice to do this, but it's possible

I did not say "mouse" anywhere, I think you might be mistaking your own comments as my own.

And, no. This is 100% Apple hardware and software. I am using Apple's trackpad, built into one of the most recent Apple laptops, using the latest Apple desktop OS.

Are you able to share the PDF in question, or a screenshot for example?

PDF editing hasn't changed, it's just that some PDFs have text fields while others don't. It's also possible that Preview isn't compatible with all PDFs' text fields, idk. That "text" button was always there as a fallback.

I am describing only the behavior of the "text" button and not of text fields, yes.

Oh ok. I'm not sure about the undo thing, but the behavior of a placeholder "text" box appearing in a random spot has always annoyed me, and it's felt hard to resize. That's not new.

Semi new thing is the removal of proper "save as" in Preview and other 1P apps starting in Lion. Still sucks and still hasn't caught on in 3P apps.

> Every part of the UI is broken, though. You have to discover this by clicking (all icons, no text)

And no tooltips either. Even by clicking I couldn't figure out what most of the buttons even do. A lot of them seem to do absolutely nothing. The only thing I've learned is to summon a randomly sized box on a random position and then struggle to resize and reposition it.

Mission Control is unusable in macOS 27. Shortcuts to switch spaces stop working (Dock must be killed to get them to work again), there is a padding between spaces thumbnails and the top of the screen so it's no longer possible to just easily move the mouse at the top to select one, windows rearrange randomly when one is clicked, full screen app spaces breaks each time you try to use them, animations are wonky and you can't reenter mission control while some animations are running, etc…

Pretty sure Apple must dedicate a product manager to coming up with new ways to break spaces in each OS release.

It sure does feel that way. But I've often maintained that Apple took a look at how people were using features like this on other operating systems and said, "NO! We're gonna 'think different'!" And no one liked their way of "thinking different". But they keep doubling down, believing that once we see the genius, we'll all come around.

I haven't yet come around. Unix had it figured out back in CDE days. i3 was my happy place... now it's Niri. As long as I can get to my workspace with a key combo THAT I DEFINE, I'm probably okay.

The funny fact is that they didn't add any new feature to Mission Control, they just rewrote it and broke it in the process.

I don't know -- my conspiracy theory for many years has been that Apple isn't really very interested in multiple desktops at all, and there's just this one engineer who's made it his life's mission to bring the idea to the masses. But the masses also aren't really very interested in multiple desktops. So every two or three versions, he screws around with the UX and says "surely this time everyone will see the genius!" And they do not.

Personally, I almost never use more than two virtual desktops on macOS, which means most of the changes and bad decisions sail over my head. I don't think I really seriously used more than two virtual desktops on any OS later than BeOS, though -- which IIRC did it really well! -- which I suspect is less a function of macOS doing it badly than a simple function of rarely feeling like I'm cramped on a 27" 5K monitor. (Yes, I know half of you are like "I have three 24-inch monitors and each one needs nine virtual desktops to accommodate all of my windows." That's fine. You do you.)

I mean... I have a 34" widescreen, and yet, I spend most of my time on my laptop screen. So having multiple workspaces is pretty helpful for focus. I think your theory is a sound one. Once they realized their main business is a single screen with ONE APP focused at a time (yes I know, iPad can do more, Duo will also do more), they stopped caring about anything else.

I just want them to make the animation faster. It makes Spaces completely useless to me that it takes what feels like 2 seconds to shift focus to a window on the new space when I swipe on my trackpad. Worse, it takes longer the higher refresh rate your monitor is; it's not too bad on 60Hz screens.

You can turn the animation off - but, when you do, there's still a ~2s pause when the workspace you switch to is dimmed and unresponsive so it feels just as janky.

There's simply no way to quickly flick from one space to another and then back again, which is something that could be done more or less instantly on Linux desktops back in the late 90s!

You can't turn the animation off, you can change it to be a fade animation instead of a slide animation. As you say, it takes the same time regardless.

I also genuinely cannot believe how broken Mission Control is. I use it constantly and the flickering, black spaces, and other small issues lead to an overall frustrating experience I did not have in 26. I'm very surprised that these issues didn't come up on HN from all the beta users, many reporting that they're very happy with 27. Is Mission Control a feature that those likely to download the beta are disproportionately unlikely to use?

I’ve been experiencing much of the same as well. There seems to be some kind of oversight over keeping previously stabilized affordances intact through each upgrade, at least in the past couple of years. It’s my theory that it’s likely to do with some kind of newly introduced AI steps in their process which doesn’t care so much about small nuanced ui spots like this but check plenty of other boxes.

Another instance in watch os is the total removal of access to the app switcher And quick jump to precious app. It’s been driving me nuts.

same… I mean, I wouldn't go so far as to call it unusable, but it was certainly that bad back around beta 2 or 3. Now it's just mostly-there.

There was clearly a fundamental refactor if not complete rewrite in Mission Control, and sadly it’s just not quite done yet.

Otherwise I've found Golden Gate to be an improvement in every way.

oh, speak of the devil… yeah there's an issue where full screen apps don't show the "stoplight" icons on hover… sometimes it takes several seconds, sometimes (with Slack just now) they never appear.

I've given up on filing radars, feels like talking about your relationship to a housecat.

I use Spaces very heavily and it is amazing how much they borked it up. Even 27.0.1 is not helping it.

Spaces really needs some attention. It makes me much more productive overall, but it really feels like it's been forgotten. Beyond just making it less buggy, some simple things would make a huge difference, like being able to rename spaces, and not only showing the name of the space when you hover over it.

Edit: Thanks for the tip about killing the dock to get the keyboard shortcuts working. That was driving me mad. Do you have to do that every restart, or will those just work now?

After every time the computer goes to sleep or something like that. I made a script to quickly restart the Dock.

Ugh, how annoying. Thanks.

Moving an application window to another space without a mouse would also be nice. I've only wanted it for, like, the past 10-15 years. Snow Leopard even had that ability. Why was it removed? That's beyond me.

I have had to work around it with the most hacky scripts possible, and it's been so annoying trying to maintain all those scripts over the years.

I swear such a shortcut exists? I sometimes accidentally trigger it and have to sit through the window-sliding-to-another-space animation.

Rename spaces + move to them by name. At one point I had a hacky buggy mess of a (Quicksilver, I think) addon that let me do this, and it was the best, even though it crashed my computer a couple of times a week.

Does anyone know how to do this, nowadays? I've lost hope that Apple will make it a native feature.

I’ve experienced spaces shortcuts not working suddenly throughout the Tahoe release at least, so I doubt it’s specifically related to Golden Gate. They could have made it worse somehow of course.

Spaces have been nearly unusably bad for a very long time in MacOS. I used them heavily, but in frustration, have simply given up on them completely. They're simply too unreliable and inconsistent, even when they're at their best.

I had a fun one where clicks stopped registering sometimes and right clicks didn’t register sometimes and my mouse disappeared randomly.

I thought my machine was broken. Turns out this is a known bug with window managers (????????)

The sporadic nature of it had me question my own sanity.

Welp, sounds like another year running Sequoia for me.

Also am I tripping or is anti-aliasing missing from the previews now? It looks like glitter when they’re moving and I swear it wasn’t like that before.

The bugs in Mission Control are a deal breaker for me. I use spaces extensively and they are almost unusable in macOS 27. It is inexplicable that they did not notice how badly they broke things.

Fortunately I only upgraded a single computer, immediately noticed the bugs, and noped out on the other computers.

They rewrote it this year and it doesn’t seem like they polished it enough :(

I tried using Mission Control with two monitors for the first time yesterday. Nothing fancy: a YouTube video in fullscreen (aka with its own Space) on the secondary screen, whatever else I was doing on the primary (built-in laptop) screen.

It was such a broken mess. Opening Mission Control and closing it again, interacting with it only on the primary screen, would often (but not always) result in the secondary screen forgetting what it was doing and going to a normal desktop space instead of the video space.

And I'm certain that windows are more prone to overlap now than they were before?

What gets me is people saying macOs 26 -> 27 is an improvement. Maybe so. But Sequoia -> 26 -> 27 is still a noticeable downgrade. So is it really an improvement: making something much worse and then slightly improving it?

Yes, it is. How can’t you follow this logic? It is an upwards trajectory. Genuinely, what are you missing about this? Two things can be true at the same time. Nobody said that there had been a historical downward trajectory. Well, at least, in your description of what “gets you”. But I’ve never really seen many people arguing that macOS hasn’t degraded over the past ~10-15 years. The fact that’s “getting you” s still worth noting and not every online comment has to be a complete, comprehensive accounting of someone’s entire position. Some things are just left unsaid because there’s a shared understanding. At this point I think that “macOS had generally gotten worse” is easily one of those.

Saying 27 is an improvement over 26 is a different statement to the one you’re making about the general trend of macOS.

Nor does it mean that people shouldn’t welcome improvements even if those improvements don’t bring the overall quality back to that of what it used to be.

But I do also agree with you that we shouldn’t be ignoring the fact that Apple have generally been on a downward spiral in terms of software quality for a number of years.

The problem with stating that 27 is an improvement over 26 is that it's ignoring the elephant in the room. It doesn't make any sense for the conversation to just stop there, and implicitly forgive all of the regressions 26 brought as water under the bridge. macOS 15 isn't just some nebulous hypothetical alternative, it's a readily-available example of what Apple actually shipped in recent history, and it should be a point of reference in discussions like this. Narrowly focusing on 27 vs 26 while ignoring 15 doesn't make any more sense than praising Windows 8.1 for fixing some problems from Windows 8 when neither was worth upgrading from Windows 7 for most people.

> The problem with stating that 27 is an improvement over 26 is that it's ignoring the elephant in the room.

You’re over thinking things. People made a closed statement. It isn’t meant as a multiple paragraph essay on the progression of macOS over the timeline of 20 years. But that doesn’t make the statement any less valid.

> It doesn't make any sense for the conversation to just stop there

The conversation didn’t stop there. We are having it still right now.

> and implicitly forgive all of the regressions 26 brought as water under the bridge.

That’s not what the aforementioned statement claims. You’re adding your own emphasis here, an emotive slant which skews the statement to mean something it didn’t.

> macOS 15 isn't just some nebulous hypothetical alternative, it's a readily-available example of what Apple actually shipped in recent history, and it should be a point of reference in discussions like this. Narrowly focusing on 27 vs 26 while ignoring 15 doesn't make any more sense than praising Windows 8.1 for fixing some problems from Windows 8 when neither was worth upgrading from Windows 7 for most people.

The reason 15 was referenced was because it’s an incremental improvement rather than introducing big new features. Just like 27 is. So in that regard, it makes more sense to compare 27 to 26 than include all of the other points of reference that you are.

———

I’m usually the first to criticise macOS. I only hate it slightly less than Windows. But you’re making emotive claims to an objective statement and complaining that others aren’t doing the same.

I'm still on Sequoia and waiting for things to get better. Thankfully I don't do dev work for Apple platforms anymore.

To me it basically feels the same as 26. All the "they're fixing Liquid Glass guys" hype turned out to be over a slider to control the transparency of the glass, when you could already set it to opaque (tinted) in 26. I guess it's an improvement for however many people were dying to have specifically 70% opaque Liquid Glass. If anything Golden Gate looks a little worse than Tahoe. They added a faux-3D effect to the Liquid Glass, which clashes with the flat design used on whatever part of the UI isn't Liquid Glass. It's as if you were using Windows 10, then got halfway through installing a Windows 7 theme before cancelling it, so random stuff is Aero vs. flat.

The biggest problem introduced in Tahoe was the massive padding areas around everything, which remain unchanged in Golden Gate. I've seen rumors that Apple is planning on a touchscreen Macbook, so maybe the padding is to make it so people will be able to use their fingers more easily. I guess they've decided to repeat the mistake Microsoft has made in Windows 8 and newer, where they destroy the UI for everyone in order to cater to whatever percentage of users prefer 2-in-1 convertible laptops.

I've been running Golden Gate since the first beta was released in June. I've generally been very happy with it. I think it'll take a couple years to unwind the Alan Dye era, but Golden Gate is a significant improvement over macOS 26

In what way?

Liquid Glass actually looks like glass now, the weird side panel changes in apps is reverted, music slider hitbox hiccups are now fixed, etc.

It's just 26 but better. On my personal macbook I upgraded from 15 to 27 directly.

Glass is UI degradation, so making it look like glass isn't an improvement, fixing slider hiccups etc is, but it's not major

> I've been running Golden Gate since the first beta was released in June. I've generally been very happy with it.

Same.

This is a bad faith article. The feel of a "buggy mess" is different from what the author described. Every OS is going to have bugs. On top of that, I cannot reproduce a lot of these issues. It's clear the OP is using multiple third party utilities to manage things like the menubar. Try turn them off and complaining.

I feel like the author wanted to write a post like one of those about Tahoe (menu bar, corner dragging), but the stuff they wrote about was all very "who cares"?

Golden Gate has reversed many of Tahoe's regressions and further updates will continue to do so.

  > This one just irks me. Show me one oval camera lens anywhere in the world. I'm waiting.

Well, OP, today is the day you learn about anamorphic lenses

> Every OS is going to have bugs

sure, but also apple has 170K full-time employees

it is a total mess for a company that used to care

Well, it looks like they care more than 1 year ago, so there’s hope still.

Yeah but the outer bit is still circular!

Seems to be the norm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamorphic_format#/media/File:...

"Every OS is going to have bugs" isn't a convincing response when Apple marketed this as a stability release. Neither does "works on my machine." You can't state with that level of certainty that they're using multiple utilities to manage the menu.

Mission Control in particular is widely reported as being broken. There are funny gifs going around on social media of the UI bugs in Golden Gate (e.g., the Siri "minigame" that moves a control across the screen). Some users are complaining that Golden Gate is an even buggier release than Tahoe in their experience.

There was a time when OS X really did feel like a polished, premium experience. There's a major software quality issue at Apple that's been complained about for years and has become very obvious in the last couple of releases. One of the social issues with criticizing Apple is that some of the more devoted users feel inclined to defend macOS regardless because, frankly, they spent a lot of money on the hardware.

While generally happy with the speed improvements it brought, I can't back question the presence of testers on Apple side. Sure they are a small niche company (/s) but they can do better. Major example, desktop switching shortcuts are borked after device comes up from sleep! >https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1whtmc3/macos_27_mis...

Apple is extremely lucky to have users like this who still work tirelessly to find and report these types of problems. They would do well to listen.

Why wouldn't Apple encourage devout users such as the author, to claim actual bounties for such finds? Like - a pair of pods for every 5 UI bugs they find? Tis a rich company after all...

Ludicrous. Bug reports by the average user are worthless and generally a net negative if you consider incorrect and duplicate reports.

Paying user for bug reports would just incentivize very prolific spammers (you know who) to fuzz your entire OS and automate sending thousands of reports a day.

Even correct bug reports are a drain on your engineers' time and attention, and it frustrates power users to file them because being amateurs they often put too much effort into doing it.

Apple traditionally had a culture of a lot of high quality bug reports, but once those become too fast for anyone to keep in their head, there's no point to them because they'll just get lost. You might as well just go look for bugs if you run out of some. You'll find them.

These are pretty worthless critiques. In the grand scheme of things, they worked on items that actually matter as opposed to these minor things that no one will notice.

Well, it sounds like you fundamentally misunderstand the appeal and the DNA of what macOS strived for then:

> "When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."

These things matter because that's what the OS has been championing for years. It's not Windows where it's almost expected to see a random Windows 95 dialog when you're trying to do something.

Apple slipping here means they've lost sight of their DNA and that's rot-from-within bad. If you are careful of the small details, that means they care enough that the larger details will iron themselves out.

Yes, like you said, there's bigger things that matter, but Apple's older software quality strived to achieve both, not just one or the other

They broke Mission Control, and people have definitely noticed it. But with regard to smaller details, Apple used to take pride in paying attention to such things. Scott Forstall would go over Apple's interfaces using a photography loupe. Your "who cares" sloppy attitude is a relatively new thing in the Apple world.

yes it is, can't even delete songs from apple music app

The author of this article is basically me when I’m bored, just trying to find some problems to complain about

some of the 'not centered' complaints are probably a little on the pedantic side. Often to visually 'center' something it's not actually centered.

To me it's like Van Halen's "No brown M&Ms" rule. If they didn't pay attention there, what else did they miss? What else did their QA team miss?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Halen_test

Thank you, I'm stealing this

what if there is nothing to catch, an icon not centered in a button might be an intentional decision by the designers. Maybe it was caught and was signed off on by the responsible party as 'correct'.

I have been avoiding new macOS versions since I tried Tahoe and hated it. Still on Sequoia.

I don't know if I'll ever upgrade to Golden Gate, and this blog post isn't giving me confidence.

Yeah, I currently have 4 Macs.

Apple 2020 Mini - Sequoia - Music/DAW

Intel 2017 MBP - Sequoia (OCLP) - Software Development

Intel 2014 MBP - Sequoia (OCLP) - Board game tutorials and videos at the gaming table (dining room)

Intel 2012 Mini - High Sierra - Very retro video gaming (doesn't access the net)

Since I can't afford to buy anything anymore, I'm keeping these the way they are for a long time. As each one dies, so does my enjoyment of computing.

Yeah, I am quite sad that I am packing up and shipping off my nifty little Intel MacBook Pro and for the first time ever, I'm wondering if I can do without a Mac, not even really wanting one.... the one form factor which sort of appeals is a Wacom Movink 13 w/ a Mac Mini (but I hate that the screen is so low resolution and none of the Cintiq Pros use the same stylus as my other stylus devices (Kindle Coloursoft, Samsung Galaxy Note and Book)

There is no benefit for upgrading from Sequoia to Golden Gate. UI isn't better looking or faster. Siri AI is not great. More bugs, not less.

Siri AI is pretty darn good for me. What are your problems with it?

I find that Siri AI cannot really do anything that I need, which is my major problem. I was truly hoping for Shortcuts to be a bit more beefed up with the introduction of Siri AI. For example, I was hoping that Siri AI could fix some of my annoyances like dismissing all notification banners. Of course, Siri AI cannot see nor work with notifications, so that's a huge bummer.

For normies, it might be nice to be able to add n > 1 reminders or calendar events, fix some grammatical errors, or whatever, but that's not particularly useful for me. I was hoping for a bit more of an AI that is truly integrated with the OS. Meanwhile, I feel like it's the worst model Gemini has to offer.

Man, on my iPhone (15 Pro), it's been a letdown.

"Please play this song on my HomePod". "Now playing"

Prolonged silence.

"Nothing is playing?"

"Now playing" (but on my iPhone, not my HomePod)

I should be writing these down, because pretty much every interaction ends in disappointment.

Feels like it's just as mediocre as old Siri, only more ambitious when it fails, and slower.

many things are way faster. for example, photos sync in the Photo app across devices instantly, app launches, airdrop transfers, etc..

I bought a MBA in 2022 and haven't ever upgraded the OS. It works fine for me, and the AI stuff seemed like it wasn't ready for prime time. While it might have provided some benefits, I was concerned that there would be more unexpected downsides.

I'd be curious to know what people think about Siri AI and whether it's finally worthwhile. I'm still running an old iPhone with no AI, so don't have much basis for comparison.

I hope you have been installing security updates for the OS version you have. At some point, those end, and then you're looking at a different trade-off in not upgrading.

Yeah, I install point updates, just not the annual ones. AFAICT, I'm still getting the security patches that I need.

You're not missing anything with the AI stuff

Even with the latest update? Having seen the reviews of iOS 27 on newer devices, I was thinking that it was finally getting capable.

Idk, whatever 26.6.2 is. Messages summarizes chats, which I guess is a little useful, but it's canceled out by the additional nagging. Either way it's not a big deal.

My company IT forced us to upgrade to Tahoe :(

Deliberately keeping it 15.x on my M3 Max.

The golden rule with MacOS is never update before February, or after August.

I waited until Aug 31 before updating to MacOS 26, a new record for me. I very much hope 27 will be ready to go by Feb 1.

I've been running the beta on my machines. Definitely a huge upgrade over Tahoe. Visually and performance-wise.

I do the same thing, except I usually run a version for two-three years and skip some OS releases in-between.

My recent upgrade was from Ventura to Sequoia, and I will likely move to Golden Gate at some point next summer right before Sequoia's support period expires (this happens in July or August). Over years it meant that I avoided some of the famous bugs like the discoveryd fiasco in Yosemite (I went from Maverics to El Capitan).

The one downside is that I sometimes have a to go through a huge app redesigns or big feature changes that have been accumulating over several versions. I ignore most of them and probably don't get as much value from the OS as I could have.

The golden rule is becoming, never update. But then, I used Snow Leopard until El Capitan, and could no longer get software updates I needed.

The new golden rule is just don't upgrade. I didn't upgrade to Tahoe, and I won't upgrade to Golden Gate

As someone who used to upgrade every year in my younger days, it feels weird to completely agree with you. Half the time I move to a new OS, it's because I got a new computer. I haven't upgraded my M2 MBA from 2022 ever.

Absolutely never update an iPhone, oldest scam in the book. I'll still update macOS if there's a particular reason and it's to a known good version, partially cause I can go back worst case.

The MBP they gave me for work runs Tahoe cause it came with it. Wouldn't have done that myself, but honestly it's fine. My only complaint is that they still haven't fixed System Settings. They gotta just roll it back to System Preferences like they did with that wifi update years ago.

My rule has been a 1 year delay but that sometimes makes life hard for Xcode/APIs or changes where your iOS and macOS device must both update for certain features. I bit the bullet and upgraded to 26 after about 6 months but updated to 27 within days because it had to be better than 26, and it is, there are just still a lot of issues.

I think it was May for me for MacOS 26. I immediately updated to 27. Despite the various bugs, it is still a solid improvement. iOS 27 was also provided huge performance boost to my 5 year old phone!

This is the correct answer. Upgrading within the first few months is an idiot move.

I may update after August, but it's to the latest stable release of the previous OS.

My understanding is that Apple has this culture of we must ship things by this date no matter what. They really should slow down and make sure things are fully baked before they get out to the final RC.

Golden Gate works pretty well so far for me.

We really don't need a new desktop OS every year.

Customers don't, but Apple does because it drives the hardware upgrade cycle.

Also, employees do because it drives the promotion cycle.

Does it really? When systems get 5+ years of supported OS upgrades, it doesn't seem like the annual OS release cycle is driving users to upgrade hardware in any meaningful way. If anything, the hardware update cycle is driving the software update schedule, because there needs to be an OS to run on the new hardware when it ships. This is especially apparent for the iPhone.

> where "nothing was off limits, no enhancement too small"

They could've shipped a smaller list of bug fixes by a given date rather than a bigger list of bugs

> My understanding is that Apple has this culture of we must ship things by this date no matter what.

It used to be very different. Apple was known for missed OS deadlines. They were sometimes compared to Blizzard back in the day; now both of them lost their reputation for polished releases. The cycle was closer to 2 years and they promised several times a tighter release schedule before ending on a yearly cycle.

I don’t think one is necessarily better than the other. Back in the day it was frequent to have a major update fail in some way and require reinstalling from scratch (though loss of data was rare). Now that releases are not that different from their predecessor, it’s much smoother. Longer cycles meant that features took much longer to get into a release. And then major fixes took more time on top of that. Now they can iterate faster, which is both a blessing and a curse.

For those who complain that we are saddle with Liquid Glass for another 2 years while they tweak it, keep in mind that it took several 2-year long release cycles to get rid of pinstripes and brushed metal.

Apple used to do that and it didn't work. Once there was a guy named Steve, who had a lot of wise quotes; you can take them or leave them but "real artists ship" was a good one.

You can ship, but then you can have some detailed (or autistic) reviewers to check it out and do an improvement cycle or two (aka beta).

Yes, they do it, but apparently the quality isn't good enough.

This one really bugs me. Could be my setup (have a few Menu-bar utilities). Anyway... I do Finder Searches a lot to find files in the current directory or system-wide using either find by file name or file contains. Get a list of files fine in response. Then close the search, and my Finder window is blank. Have to click to another folder in the Sidebar, then back to my original folder to get the full folder contents to show. All previous OS versions returned back to list all the files.

Also not a bug, but a bad recession ihmo. I always used to have Finder>Show-Hidden-Files option on. Now it is always off, and one must Cmd+Shift+. to show hidden files each time one opens a directory. Why take that option away ??

If anyone has insights about what might be causing my blank "after search" window, and/or a way to make show hidden files the default please advise. Thx, NSC

Anyone having issues working with WisprFlow on Golden Gate using an external mike? (e.g., logi)

There are so many new bugs…

Safari Developer Tools freezes the app.

Even though I’ve disabled the Siri AI tools, they still show up everywhere for some reason.

The main menu bar sometimes gets darker.

Apple Mail keeps formatting my emails in ways I don’t like (bullet lists, etc.).

Apple Mail Smart Mailboxes are broken if you have multiple Macs.

The list goes on…

> The main menu bar sometimes gets darker.

I had this happen after toggling the menu bar background / Liquid Glass transparency settings a couple times. I think a window (from Firefox) somehow got positioned slightly behind the menu bar, which was causing it to take its color from the window instead of my desktop background when it was on top.

Find the window, then Option + maximize button should fix it.

I just figured out how to work around the Firefox taskbar menu drop-down being stuck in a highlight which disables the function of that menu item. Say the File drop-down is highlighted, just click on the menu function next to it like Edit and slide the cursor to the File drop-down and the highlight goes away and the File menu function is restored.

I couldn't reproduce the Color Picker bug mentioned at the end.

Just one small thing to add about the Color Picker: I think it's a good example of how native UI apps have changed over the last decade.

The macOS Color Picker is nice. The idea is to have a single color picker for the whole system. It's extensible, so apps can add their own custom pickers (for example, an OKLCH picker), and you can reuse your palettes across applications.

Sounds great! But most of the applications where you might care about those features (customization, sharing your color schemes, etc.) don't work with the native Color Picker: Figma, Adobe apps, all Electron-based apps, and so on. So the Color Picker's features are useless. That component of the system is exactly the same as it was when I got my first Mac in 2007.

There are multiple nice native features that apps don't use; over time, they become forgotten and barely maintained.

I don't know what the solution is, but at some point, I think Apple should take frameworks like Tauri or Electron into account and build integrations for developers who use them. I know the integrations exists (they are the native APIs), and it's the developers' responsibility to use them, but that's not happening, and it ends up affecting the UX.

> build integrations for developers who use them.

in practice, developers will not use them. they think they have better ideas and they don't care about platform or the user as an abstraction over the platform. they could use the existing thing.

it's the same mindset that has automakers not wanting to support CarPlay. they think they can do it better or just as well and it's completely missing the point: the user doesn't want to fuck with their custom one-off UI.

> When using the Colours window, if you're the sort of person who uses its built-in eyedropper tool to choose a colour from the wheel (rather than simply clicking on it directly), then congratulations: doing that hangs the entire system, and you've got no choice but to force a restart.

I cannot reproduce this on 27. I think writers should undertake some degree of wider research before making strong, universal claims.

Interesting, someone else said they couldn't reproduce that either, but a quick search when I wrote it confirmed I was not the only one.

On reflection it does sound like I'm implying most things in this post are universal. I, of course, would have no way to verify that. Perhaps I should've taken greater pains to note that YMMV. Thanks for that.

Could be Intel specific -- the writer has a touch bar.

In related news, Apple’s new CEO wants products launched faster while reducing headcount. That can only push quality in one direction.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/29/apple-to-launch-product...

On my M1 Macbook pro, running screen sharing in full screen mode has a big bug in that the screen sharing menus/controls aren't visible when I move the mouse cursor above the taskbar displayed from the remote system. Normally, doing this causes the screen share controls to become visible. Now I find that with the cursor at the top of the screen and my pressing the Control key the screen sharing controls become visible. I write this in case others are having the same issue.

It's too slow. Safari crashes too often. But the rather bigger mess for me has been iOS 27 (on my 17) – slowness and the battery drain. Goodness, what have I done on my phone thaat made it into a proper before and after scenario. I had to disable my mission corner hot corner it was so broken. It amazes me how a trillion dollar company manages to break their already broken OS even further. I guess the reason is they know it isn't going to matter. The good hint is the hordes of people (even on hn) finding it necessary to post their polite (of course!) and subtle rebuttals in the form of "been using <certain Apple product> for the last <certain period>, couldn't be happier)".

> slowness and the battery drain.

Isn’t that the index being re-built? That takes a bit of time after the upgrade, but other than that it really should not be slower or use more battery. My 15 certainly does not. Maybe try to get in touch with their support?

I'll be real I'm not going to argue with the author but having had to use Windows 11 now for the last few months, these bugs seems like a polished castle compared to the state of the windows desktop.

I'll grant you that!

definitive proof that apple's engineers are using GNOME workstations internally: now MacOS system apps look like any software created using that garbage pile called libadwaita.

At least Gnome doesn't have liquid glass

Are you crazy? libadwaita looks way, way more polished and consistent than anything I've seen on macos for the last at least 5 years. And only one of these is an open-source project with a limited budget.

TIL there’s a nice Linux clone of the Mac UI https://blogs.gnome.org/alicem/files/2023/09/header.png

Sequoia was the Snow Leopard of the 2020s. Going from that high to the lows of tahoe or golden gate is a real and jarring downgrade.

macOS Mojave remains my favorite macOS. Introduced dark mode support. It felt very polished to me. I used it heavily on a (now old) 2015 MBPr which some consider the last of the "original" MBP line. Sequoia followed it and dropped 32-bit support without adding anything I needed.

Same here, it's by far the most stable. After being forced to use Sequoia for the last two years and getting used to the horrible swathes of bugs, I had to pull out an old 2018 mini with Mojave on it a few days ago and nearly cried at how fast and snappy the Finder is.

Can Golden Gate really be considered a fix release for Tahoe with its massive AI updates?

The mis-alignment trope is well established, be it in the corners or at the center, but there are bigger design sins:

- wastefully large "zero KB" text to signal nothing

- poor text legibility due too light of a gray color - if you don't want people to read that text, don't add it! Or hide behind some tooltip or something

- tiny font size with a lot of space wasted, that's bigger than small margins

- the useless brightness of persistent window controls, they are way too common and unimportant, especially for keyboard users that never even click on then

> I know my machine's getting old, but does it really need a second to load in the Profiles menu when I open a new Firefox window?

I don't see how age matters here for such primitive low cost operations, so no, it should be instant on a machine older than yours

> Sometimes the search bar in System Settings simply refuses to work.

This continues to be a very frequently highlighted epic fail across various Apple platforms. I wonder, is there any substantive explanation on why it's so bad for so long?

> Perhaps there's hope yet. Snow Leopard had nearly two years of refinements to achieve the level of polish and stability its name has become synonymous with today.

Not really, it's more like it has years of memory loss leading to a bunch of bugs like in this blog to be forgotten and the marketing tag taken over. So definitely there is hope, just wait a decade...

The most glaring regression in macOS 27 for me is random audio popping/crackling in the Spotify client, otherwise it's mostly fine tbh.

It's such an obvious issue that I'm wondering whether I'm the only one experiencing it or whether Apple users just don't use Spotify or whether Spotify simply doesn't test on macOS (and as such I have no idea where even to write a ticket, the macOS Feedback app doesn't even have a category for problems in non-Apple applications).

I think those clicks and pops are a Chromium issue. The Spotify desktop app uses Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). I use to hear those all the time when using Chrome and they've mostly disappeared now that I mostly use FF.

Where are the bugs that aren't just annoying UI/UX nitpicks that we can skip to hit the release date?

Golden Gate is one of the first MacOS releases with more of an enterprise focus. There's a lot under the hood that will be massive to support power users, IT admins, and the like. I'd save the complaints for massive failures in networking configuration or permissions management or anything like that, not button alignment.

This isn't a new bug, it was present in MacOS Tahoe, but what happened to the tabs in the Maps app? The View menu still has Show Tab Bar and Show All Tabs itms, but they are always greyed-out. Cmd-T doesn't open a new tab, as was the case before Tahoe. (I count this as a bug in that the UI seems inconsistent with the function.) If anyone knows how to regain access to tabs, I'd love to hear it.

> This isn't a new bug

They don't just mention one bug here.

Especially worrying is the last bug, which hangs the entire system.

I recommend reading more than the first two clauses of the above comment.

Yes, fair.

It still isn't apparent to me why Apple decided to take their otherwise logical and fine UI, and create Liquid Glass. I guess somebody got a nice new title and bonus, though?

Did they fix the bug where the toolbar of applications would either get stuck open or disappear while in full screen mode, requiring them to be moved to the desktop before returned to fullscreen?

Promotion driven development. It was really good before, honestly.

Sure, if you mean getting promoted out the window.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-03/apple-des...

These problems look to me like the result of writing N implementations of X, rather than 1 common X shared by all the apps.

For Golden Gate I broke my general rule of "never install *.0 of a release" and Golden Gate has shown me why I have this rule.

Opens with a reference to Snow Leopard, I miss it to this day.

I’m not in any way aware of how macOS is architected, but aren’t all these inconsistencies (like different app icons, different menu styles, different window corners etc) pointing to bad code design? There should be one shared source of truth for what needs to be consistent.

That used to be true - back when memory use mattered; before the code base grew to consume all available memory.

My favourite bug so far is using Cmd+Tab to quick switch apps when you have two monitors puts the list of apps up on a random display each time.

It’s keeping my neck muscles in shape trying to find it each time that’s for sure.

These visual UI problems which are showing some sloppiness in the UI is much better than macOS 26 and honestly I really like Golden Gate for more efficiency and the fact that Siri actually works now and can replace a great deal of things I usually would have googled.

For me, iPhone mirroring is entirely broken, it worked flawlessly in version 26, but in version 27 I cannot browse the same device. I upgraded both devices to 27.0.1, and mirroring remains completely broken, as the iPhone appears to reject the key exchange.

I've had a random annoying bug where a mysterious window with no controls and no menu bar presence appears on top of all of my apps with seemingly no origin, rhyme, or reason, and I can't do anything to get rid of it except restart. It looks suspiciously like one of the "do you want to allow this accessory to connect" dialog boxes but it doesn't have any text. It's really mystifying.

I hoped this update would've made my Mac more stable from the last release, and while maybe the performance is better, I feel like issues like this do randomly occur.

I have this, on Tahoe, and tracked it to Zoom. Still have no clue WHY, but it appears when I join a meeting and stays until I disconnect. It’s very annoying.

That's very interesting, because I don't have Zoom installed. I wonder if it is an OS prompt or something that isn't being rendered?

For 99.9% of us, these mean nothing. This article is pretentious.

Classic Apple fans hyperfixating on things that do not matter. Misguided critiques like this are why Apple fans have such a bad reputation.

To be fair I think most self-aware Apple fans would agree they're pretentious and hyper fixate on things

This, this this the gripe list for macOS 27? I guess I'll add on, then:

They've completely broken every experience around minimized windows:

- App Expose doesn't show minimized windows at all

- Cmd-` iterating doesn't iterate through minimized windows.

- I've had times where Cmd-`-ing to another Terminal yanked it from it's workspace onto my current one.

- It will just stop rendering the Mission Control thumbnails. 90% of the time it just shows empty workspaces

- It seems to be doing some stupid optimization where it blanks out my Firefox window until the workspace switch animation has fully finished. Likely it's part of how they finally removed the janky animations from the past 3 releases. But, COME ON Wayland can run on my 5 year old x86_64-linux laptop with perfect animations with none of this jank and compromise.

- It regularly doesn't change focus from Firefox (on my second workspace) to Firefox Nightly (on my first workspace), when swiping. Or even swiping and clicking. Only if you swipe, move the cursor and then click does focus shift to the open, top app on the workspace.

It's hot f****king garbage. Maybe this is my foot peddle but it breaks every basic way I do window management and use the OS.

Breaking minimized windows. Only Apple could manage that.

I'm so glad I stayed on Sequoia, gonna wait this mess out

Could be a long wait. Mail is the one app I care most about and it's been broken in different ways since Catalina, along with issues in Photos, Music, etc. Might as well go to Linux where it's at least possible to fix the high priority issues.

Stayed on Catalina for a few versions, if I was stuck for 4 years it would be fine. 2027 is the YOTLD ;)

I haven't noticed any bigger bugs (Apart from search in System Settings still not working), the main annoyance is the Siri bubble showing up next to text fields.

Is it safe to assume at this point that GNU and the kernel accept AI code but there is quality control compared to private companies ? What I am hearing (and what friends talk about) is that with AI everyone is hooked on quantity while quality has taken a back seat. I would assume that the quantity and features don't bother free software much so they can take their own sweet time with these things.

This post prompted me to try my pet long-standing bug, where you have Dock auto-hiding on, show it, mouse away, mouse back before the sliding animation is finished, and see what happens. Previously the animation would just finish and it wouldn't show again, but in Golden Gate it does. Praise be. I did respond to an Apple survey a little while back and mentioned this one so maybe it got through...

I think it also helps to remove the delay for showing the hidden Dock

  defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0 && defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.15 && killall Dock

Thanks. I might try it, but to be honest I don't particularly dislike the animation.

this keeps the animation (although speeds it up a bit - replace 0.15 with another number to change it) it just removes the delay before the animation starts

It surely is the worst release based on my experience.

* bluetooth keyboard suddenly very laggy * mission control spaces shortcuts

Can't believe they made this glaring oversight.

> Can't they made this glaring oversight.

smdh

I’ve been having some weird issues since upgrading that I haven’t been able to pinpoint if it’s the apps or the OS.

New since upgrading:

- In telegram messages get stuck sending and the app has to be force quit - Discord doesn’t pick up audio device changes until the app is restarted - Soundsource has crashed a few times if I change my AirPods out. - Selecting a screenshot area is laggy when dragging the selection box

> Bugs are elsewhere in the system, too. Sometimes the search bar in System Settings simply refuses to work.

Yep, I've run into this and issues where clicking the search results or normal sidebar items in settings do nothing. Even after killing and restarting Settings.

Golden Gate is better than Tahoe IMHO but only slightly. I hope they circle back to the myriad of bugs/UI issues they introduced.

Should I stay on Sequoia? I’m seeing a few apps now required 26+ so I’m considering upgrading, but I don’t really want to tbh

I don’t understand why System Settings search is such a dumpster fire. It’s up to a couple thousand (probably overestimating) fixed text labels. Even when it’s not bugging out, half or more of deeper labels simply can’t be found even if you enter the exact string; and by deeper I mean simply not top level categories. Who the hell thought this sorry ass search is okay to ship and keep it that way after this many years? I swear even Windows’ settings search is more capable.

It was fine until a few releases ago, then they rewrote it, and it sucks now. Had to give it that SwiftUI magic.

Yes, IIRC System Preferences was fine (hopefully not rose-tinted glasses), it became the current piece of shit when it was reborn as iOS-sibling System Settings, in Ventura?

  > then they rewrote it

they keep doing this, and everything gets worse for it; i remember when they rewrite mDNSResponder and internet connectivity went to hell... and the ux in system preferences is atrocious... just text labels and lists everywhere, no attention to detail.

the people who built/designed/managed the rollout osx and nextstep were a totally different breed imo

mDNSResponder => discoveryd was so disastrous they apologized the next WWDC.

Maybe Apple ported the Spotlight algorithm over for the System Settings search? Spotlight has, well, unique properties that take extra effort to achieve in a search system.

Ever since I got my first Macbook a few years ago, I marvel at the sloppy German translation on the lock screen. It's literary the first text a user sees. ("Endsperren zum fortfaren." -- there are 3 typos in this one simple text.) It hurts my eyes every time.

Ouch. Glad I switched my Mac to English a long time ago (mainly to avoid weirdly chopped "gender:ed" "language").

> Here's a fun fact: You can find references to NeXTSTEP, the ancestor of macOS, in its UI! You're not supposed to, mind.

This confused me; the NS prefix has been part of OSX since the beginning. I get that it shouldn’t have been shown but it’s hardly some deep secret

Yeah it's no secret, it was just a visual glitch that shouldn't have been visible to the end user. All NS* references can be traced back to NeXTSTEP

I've had really good luck with Golden Gate. I like this release.

I feel like every Apple software release just spawns "it wasn't like this in the old days everything is a mess" articles. It's just noise now.

Reports like this make it sound like there aren't serious flaws and bugs in MacOS. The things he's listing are trivialities.

I started writing a list of UX and software bugs in Mac OS, but honestly, I don't have the energy or time, there are so many. Mac OS has become an absolute travesty of an OS.

>Mac OS has become an absolute travesty of an OS

It's the worst desktop OS there is.. except for all the others.

This is exactly how I feel. It's like "Haha, what are you going to do? Go to Windows?". Linux would be an option if the software options were there.

I’m usually upgrading my Mac OS major version around x.2.2

Anything prior to that is anything goes, in my experience.

Aren't we supposed to be living in a world of accelerated software abundance because of AI?

Abundance? Yes. Quality? No. I generated over 10,000 lines yesterday because "someone wants the whole thing done in a week." I did look at some of it. Real fast.

Private deployed instances of Claude models at Apple has been reported written majority of their code. Perhaps these visual bugs are the manifest of Claude's weakness in vision in the past 6-12 months? Admittedly Claude's vision has gotten better this year.

Well, even ignoring Claude’s capabilities, you would expect human testers (whether Apple employees or external beta testers) to be creating bug reports for all these things. It’s embarrassing if your self-proclaimed bug-fix/stability release is buggy and unstable. If the bugs are filed, then Claude should be able to help fix them.

Claude sucks at programming. It should be no surprise that if Apple is just letting it rip, they are getting bad software as a result.

I've noticed some mini AI icon that's sometimes shows up when I select some text on Safari - I've no Siri enabled - and when I click on it nothing happens (when I'm able to click, I need to be fast like Sonic to catch it!!)

Golden Goat cannot handle permissions requests when you’re away from your desk - which is easy to trigger with remote control of agents.

Apple positioned themselves as hardware company but continue to sell us ads and locked in software.

If they are open their platform wildly, the open source community will help, but Apple closes platform, close mind.

I hope that with Opus 5.5 they will be able to fix more bugs in the next version of macos, in the meantime I will stay on Sonoma. This is really disappointing since Golden Gate was supposed to be a bugfix update

I personally haven’t noticed any serious bugs yet, but I can’t help but notice how jittery the animations have become compared to just two versions before. It doesn’t feel “smooth” anymore even on new hardware.

> Take the QuickTime record button.

Arguably it’s visually centered, because the menu arrow on its right is changing the visual weight between left and right.

It may be a layout accident, but it might also be deliberate.

I doubt it. That was when starting an audio recording. When starting a video recording, it's off-centre in the other direction, despite the UI being largely the same!

I'm honestly very puzzled by all the positive comments I've seen about Golden Gate, it's strictly worse in my experience (i.e., I can't think of any old bugs that don't bother me anymore, but there are annoying new ones). For example, I can report the same menubar bug as the author: as I'm typing this very comment, my Firefox menubar has two menus permanently "selected" [0]. I use the Hiding option for the Dock, but ever since I upgraded the Dock randomly switches into an unhidden state (but it still thinks it's hidden, so I have to disable Hiding and then re-enable it to fix the behavior). I now have to semi-regularly `sudo killall coreaudiod` to fix the audio randomly cutting out on my AirPods (this would occasionally happen before, but it's gotten way more frequent). I'm left very unimpressed with whatever's going on at Apple.

I just checked and 27.0.1 is out, so here's hoping it fixes anything....

[0] https://imgur.com/a/5i5TlzQ

EDIT: Actually, one bug that I haven't noticed on Tahoe is the weird lack of vertical padding that some System Settings screens used to have. Credit where credit's due.

iOS 27 is in the same situation: a little bit less annoying than 26 overall but new bugs all over the place. If that is the Tim Cook farewell, it leaves a very bad impression.

Please please can we get a modern Snow Leopard upgrade?

My experience of 27 is that's basically what it is over 26. I've had zero noticeable problems since developer beta 1.

But we shouldn't be comparing to 26.

Upgraded and now audio won't play out of my HDMI monitor. I wouldn't think this would count as a very niche use case, but what do I know.

I think these pale in comparison to the deliberate and brainless design regression that has unfortunately continued with this latest release.

"Liquid Glass" was unmitigated garbage from day one, but now look at the "tabs" in Safari. They're even worse; the selected tab is barely discernible. Why the mania for obscuring WTF you're looking at? It's never-ending.

There are anti-user degradations tucked away throughout the system. Another example, from the last OS: Mail now lacks a "get new mail" button. Apple DELETED that from the toolbar. WHY?

So now, when my mom is trying to log in somewhere and it says "check your E-mail for a confirmation code" or something, she can't just go to Mail and press the "get mail" button. It's just so gallingly stupid.

You can absolutely add it back using their toolbar customization tool. I added mine ages ago and it’s still present in macOS 27.

I'll throw my anecdote into the mix that I haven't had any trouble, with mission control or otherwise.

Wonder how much of this is caused by SwiftUI

also ios 27. this is the second time Apple Wallet has frozen when I tried to pay at the cashier. It's really embarrassing.

Yeah the iPhone liquid glass update made everything so glitchy and slow. Mac updates haven't been a big problem, just slight downgrades.

This is certainly where the expectation to pay premium doesn't match the actual product.

I’m holding out for MacOS doing everything in react because it’s working so well for Windows

I noticed the Quick Look animation (space bar on any file) is very sluggish, at least on my M2 Max.

Funnily enough that was one of the things Golden Gate fixed, at least for me on my M1.

The quality of their software has been inversely proportional to earnings for a while now.

This is an important article. It catalogues the failures that are contributing to the demise of Apple's reputation as a company that was utterly focussed on user experience.

Unfortunately, some of these bugs make using the OS for daily tasks frustrating. That is not a good look for the software that runs such expensive pieces of hardware. I am becoming saddened and disappointed by Apple. I am losing my ability to defend my choice to Windows users.

The Mac User Guide on the site was updated to Golden Gate on launch day. There were lingering server-side cache issues that would occasionally display the Tahoe version to some users.

These should have been fixed as of a couple weeks now.

Anyone still seeing Tahoe? If so, please reply with the URL you are visiting.

Only issue I've seen is search doesn't work in Settings.

Edit: 27.0.1 fixed that.

This is a usual crap Apple has turned to, other things are so fucked up, so I’d close my eyes on the former. E.g.:

Apple (iCloud) Data Recovery works only if you deleted files from Drive via GUI, which places them in Trash.

So you actually do have them. Whaat? Why would you need a recovery? Good question.

Now it gets really interesting: you’ve emptied the Trash and now wanna to recover some.

But they are no more. Gone. Can’t be recovered anymore.

And there is a reason of course: because fuck you, that’s why.

And it’s documented FYI, so it’s a feature.

Checkmate.

It looks like Tahoe is about to become the new Snow Leopard.

iMessage (Messages) doesn't work for me after upgrading. Downgrading to macOS 26 looks to be a chore so I guess I'm just SOL until it gets patched.

I had this naive assumption for years that MacOS was the most stable / workable *nix desktop available, but I’d been sleeping on modern Linux distros.

Been on Mac since the 90s, now a very happy Linux desktop user.

Linux world hasn't even settled on what display system to use.

Have they fixed getting a name server over VPN?

What I notice is that the entire OS feels very laggy. Many interactions just don’t feel as snappy anymore as before. The worst candidate for this is definitely Mission Control, it has become a total dumpster fire in my opinion. (BTW: running on an M4 Pro MBP)

looks like a typical level of silly if not idiotic regressions if AI is involved in coding and there is no quality control over the whole process before releasing, just trusting AI did the job well.. to me, based on symptoms described in this article.

I see the same in Microsoft software for a while, core office is heavily developed by AI these days for sure, considering the same level of idiotic bugs that are definitively unchecked QA/QC regressions.

not to mention that the Music app that has been completely destroyed in macOS 26 is still completely unusable

all of us on Sequoia watching carefully to ... not move! (and waiting for the zen6+linux)

If anybody from Apple is reading, just give this article link to claude or codex and have it fixed! The work has already being done for you!

It could be that those bugs are Claude or Codex works of art.

In the not so distant future we'll just ask Claude to rewrite the entire MacOS from scratch without those bugs :)

Considering Apple is one of the most profitable companies in history I hold it to a high standard...which it isn't living up to. I find that deeply disappointing. You'd think with the money they're earning they could at least find some talented developers. To me it looks like they're fishing up trash from the gutter and putting them to work on its operating system. Also, it seems they're more interested in visual polish than day-to-day functionality.

This isn't new of course, it's old news. Mac OS X has been buggy since I developed for it more than two decades ago.

> they're more interested in visual polish than day-to-day functionality.

Form over function has been the rotten core of Apple ever since it's lost a bite!

Considering how badly Microsoft is f*king up Windows, I’ll stick with MacOS, BSD, and OpenSuse as desktop systems, thanks.

Hell, I have just three systems left which are Windows. One is a bare-bones system purely for travel convenience, another is an accounting system for a workflow that cannot (yet!) be translated to another platform, and the third being my Visual Studio / MSSQL dev platform for traditional windows apps (yes, I still support some absolutely ancient VB stuff). None of which I want to virtualize, for various reasons that include physical location.

Every year some crybaby have issues. The upgrade experience has been flawless for years without needing a full clean reinstall

watchOS 27 broke noise monitoring.

It’s been an improvement for me.

They are vibecoding too much

I haven't noticed any bugs yet. And I actually like Liquid Glass, cranked the transparency to the max. AMA.

SL had plenty of UI updates.

I don't get it. We're 2-3 years into the widespread availability of LLMs and software quality, instead of improving, seems to be taking a nose-dive. This is the kind of dissonance between marketing and outcomes that's foundational to my skepticism about AI. Where is all the *good* software that AI is enabling?

I always thought the eyedropper was so you could match color from an existing element. It never occurred to me to use it to use it in order to zoom in on the color wheel. Am I the only one who used it differently?

For a laugh, ask Siri AI “how do I contact Apple’s CEO?”

For a cry, ask it how to change the keyboard shortcut for activating Siri in Golden Gate.

Every time I read one of these types of posts, I never have any idea what the author is talking about.

Windows Vista. Is that you?

Not my experience at all. Golden Gate runs smooth as butter with no issues except spotlight being as buns as it's always been.

Generally speaking, same. I haven't noticed any major bugs at all.

So is iOS

Hell, frickin watchOS 27 Siri on my Ultra 3 can't set a timer because "the Clock app isn't installed on this device" ...????

and 2027 was supposed to be a "polishing" release.

When will we start seeing the benefits of all the smart AI coding shit they've supposedly rented from Anthropic? 2030?

We are seeing the benefits in real time in this release if those images mean anything lol

At this point you gotta think Apple is not using AI, or using too much AI, or using AI incorrectly. But then again, it’s not just them —- it’s everyone, really.

A friend who quit Apple a month or two ago left mostly because the whole company was utterly AI-pilled and they couldn’t take being a meat proxy talking to other meat proxies any more.

I sure ain’t upgrading my Mac any time soon if I can help it.

Once more in comparison to who? In the tech world today the overall combination of Apple Silicon (hardware) and Mac OS (operating system) is the best combination you can buy today for most people (if you are spending your own money), and yes it's not perfect so what who is better? No one.

The current trajectory of Apple Silicon and Mac OS is not being equaled by Microsoft, Linux and Google.

The leading question for Apple going forward is what are they going to do with memory in-house or out?

Maybe they should try replacing some of their product managers with AI

These are the benefits.

I read the first “bug” about some icons being microscopically off-center and then I started to scroll through the rest, trying to figure out if the whole piece was some sarcastic response to someone who is baselessly complaining about the release being a buggy mess.

But I guess the author is seriously complaining about an icon being off center and saying that makes it buggy mess. Seriously?

This. I stopped reading about halfway through when I realized they were almost all minor nitpicks or personal opinions. The others seem to be corner or edge cases and judging by how nitpicky the author was with the others, probably required going out of one's way to reproduce.

This is AI at work

it's trash - unbelievable

it's trash unbelievable

  > Registered March 19, 2012

C'mon, you've been here long enough to know better.

I can't help but imagine King Charles whispering conspiratorially into Tim Cook's ear at that Windsor all-CEOs dinner: "make them suffferrr".

I'm finding it quicker and more responsive than Tahoe, but I've run into a couple bugs that vex me. None are super troublesome, but I notice them.

The biggest one is that moving application stacks in Mission Control no longer works. In Tahoe and prior systems, if you invoked Mission Control with the "group windows by application" option turned on, windows belonging to a given app were "stacked" under an icon for that application.

This allows the user to move ALL of an app's windows from one display to another, or from one Space (Mac virtual desktop) to another, without having to drag them one at a time.

This broke in GG. I'm sure it'll get fixed in the .1 release, but it's annoying for now.

Commonly held lore is that you do not install a macOS with a minor version of zero. That has been confirmed by shoddy first releases ever since there's a macOS X.

Wait for the next upgrade unless you're forced to go with the first release.

Every release of MacOS is a mess. Then it gets slightly better and you find workarounds just in time for the next release. That's just how it has always been.

In comparison to what? Windows, Linux.

MacOS has felt like AI slop since before there was AI. I'm a decades long mac user, and there's simply no excuse for how sloppy their releases have become

Look at Apple's market cap and salary ranges before reading this article.

It’s 25 years old at this point and got lapped by Gnome & kde at least 10 years ago.

It’s time for some apple internal honesty about the state of MacOS gui.

i have a 25% repro focus bug with Spotlight search on ipad when using a keyboard. trouble is, I've reported bugs to Apple, and it's a black hole. why bother?

happy i've waited

macOS 15 is the last usable release.

I switched from Linux to macOS but the lack of QA is going to force me back to Linux once security updates stop for Sequoia.

> macOS 15 is the last usable release.

Same. Will sell my Air when security updates stop for Sequoia

Put Linux on the thing? I'm using an ancient MB Air with Debian, works just fine. Same for an ancient 27" iMac, also running Debian without any problems.

M4... Let's see what asahi achieves

10.5 Leopard was my peak. 10.6 Snow Leopard improved on its stability but had a touch of visible regretion (in my opinion). After that, I haven't really been happy with any release. Obviously some things have improved but... 10.5 was branded Unix, the UI was beautiful. It felt solid.

bruh, y the hell is my MacBook lagging now?!

bro why the hell is my MacBook lagging now?

I'm sure there's plenty of actual bugs, but a list of places where alignment is off by a few pixels ain't it, chief.

What about they list of places where search doesn't work or the menu crashes or is very slow? Does that count, chief?

I was chatting with a friend about The Decline and Fall of Apple over the weekend. We both miss Steve Jobs.

For all that Steve was batshit he was willing to do hard things that were "bad for business." I heard so many legendary stories over the years of Steve Jobs holding up releases at the last minute because they weren't up to par. That takes guts in a corporate environment where there is so much pressure to go along and say "well, we have to ship something." No, you don't have to ship something. You can take your time to do it right and ship things that are high quality.

Apple shouldn't assume that just because they are the incumbent that they will be around forever. Today's Steve Jobs could already be alive and plotting...

If the future Steve Jobs is out there hopefully he's working on Windows, Linux, with a dash of Android...

Everything Apple is a disaster nowadays. Everything.

Golden Gate macOS Finder puts me 2/3 the way down in a long list of files each time I go to a folder. Not all the way the bottom where new files are. So I have to scroll 20 times over now in each freaking multi-thousand file folder. Yay thanks. Never been an issue in 20 years of Mac.

Updated to iOS 27.0.1 on iPhone. Crashes almost every app. Yay.

Bought Beats 360. Battery drains even when turned off. 32 hrs alleged battery life. Headphones last barely one day (with 2hrs of actual usage) thanks to excessive battery drain.

400$ iPad keyboard started peeling off after a year. Apple told me to buy a new one. I told them to go f themselves. A new tablet costs as much as this keyboard.

etc etc etc

It's a company that has hugely declined but remained unnoticed due to sales lagging product state by years. This will eventually come to haunt them.

am I the only one not liking the black tint in Spotlight?

Still rocking a Sonoma and everything works, without the liquid glass slop.

same here, glad I didn't update to Golden Gate when it was released, even if I was tempted.

Just AI it /s

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