Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts

https://robservatory.com/block-the-upgrade-to-tahoe-alerts-and-system-settings-indicator/

by todsacerdoti • 5 months ago

318 174 5 months ago

thecopy• 5 months ago

Im planning on getting the new M5 MBP i expect to be released next week. Is it possible to downgrade? I assume it comes with Tahoe :(

mpalmer• 5 months ago

Almost certainly not :|

mhurron• 5 months ago

Typically no, Mac's don't expect to run versions of macOS before the one they were released with.

teaearlgraycold2• 5 months ago

Why not buy a used M4 Pro/Max?

layer8• 5 months ago

It’s not worth it, especially since the M6 MBP is rumored to already come out later this year (though likely with a price hike): https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/26/two-unique-new-macbook-pros-a...

cosmic_cheese• 5 months ago

Depends on what one is looking for. I'm considering upgrading to an M5 model because while the M6 redesign might come with some nicer specs, it's also going to be coming with some teething pains by virtue of having a new design. The M5 generation is probably going to be a speed bump with a chassis and screen that's a known quantity and has had the kinks smoothed out.

sgloutnikov• 5 months ago

It's possible if you do a wipe and do a fresh install. You essentially boot into the Sequoia installer. I'm also looking at possibly picking up a M5 MBP and was the first things I looked into.

grliga• 5 months ago

I bought a refurb m4 mac recently just to avoid tahoe slop ... worth considering, I think.

bla3• 5 months ago

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/how-to-downgrade-fro... describes how to downgrade.

latexr• 5 months ago

From that page:

As a rule of thumb, Macs will not run any version of macOS older than the one they shipped with when they launched. Apple provides security updates for older versions of macOS, but it doesn’t bother backporting drivers and other hardware support from newer versions to older ones.

So the answer is “no”, they probably won’t be able to downgrade on the models that are about to be released.

DavidPiper3• 5 months ago

I accidentally hit the wrong button a few weeks ago and upgraded to Tahoe. I didn't think it was that big a deal at the time, I'd just been putting it off.

But having used it for a few weeks now I can confirm it is a strict downgrade over Sequoia for me. I use none of the new features it has introduced, and the changes to existing features are just worse.

Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro. The Finder has gone from fine to janky once again, especially with horizontal scroll. The window corners and mouse interactions are indeed annoying (I'd assumed the many complaints were at least slight hyperbole). Left-aligned window titles are unbalanced and ugly. I've had weird (visual) app duplication issues with the Application smart-folder in the Dock. Cross-device copy-paste SEEMS to be more flaky than usual. And most petty of all I really don't like the new icons - especially the Trash icon for some reason.

Hamuko• 5 months ago

I have Tahoe on my work laptop and Sequoia on my personal desktop, and the thing that keeps me the most rooted on Sequoia is the padding. Everything on Tahoe is padded to hell and back. And the new tab design sucks so much. iTerm2 tabs look fucking terrible in it.

dgemm• 5 months ago

Same - 13" macbook screen becomes less functional when you fill it with padding.

mxs_• 5 months ago

they have really tried hard to make the entire OS less usable. I'm not an "iToddler", I paid for a Unix workstation and will not have lower information density forced onto me.

deadbabe3• 5 months ago

Why are you not using Ghostty instead of iTerm2?

gib4442• 5 months ago

Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro

On an M4 Pro! Pure planned obsecelence. Noticed it regularly with major MacOS releases. Nothing will convince me otherwise.

teaearlgraycold2• 5 months ago

Yeah they should have bought the M5 Pro /s

kdheiwns• 5 months ago

I got an M5 and it unfortunately had Tahoe preinstalled. Out of the box, Quicklook is choppy. My non-Tahoe M1 is buttery smooth. I don't know how Apple managed to ruin a feature that's been running smoothly for decades.

Gigachad• 5 months ago

Anecdotally, I’ve had Tahoe installed for ages now and it runs perfectly smooth on my M1 Pro with an external 4k display as well.

TuxSH• 5 months ago

Also Apple Music is much worse (harder to bring miniplayer, seek bar harder to use) and list of misfeatures goes on and on and on

ed_mercer• 5 months ago

Oh man, that's concerning since it was already terrible on Sonoma. I've been using Museeks for years now.

wombatpm• 5 months ago

You have to give Apple credit where credit is due. They have managed to make first iTunes and now Music worse with every release. Which is truly amazing.

dgxyz• 5 months ago

Aye it’s fucking terrible. Seek bar is impossible.

laserlight• 5 months ago

I've lowered my expectations over the years, but there's this single stupidity that drives me crazy: When you search for a keyword and play a song from the results, playback continues with the rest of the search results. Why the hell would I want to play all of the songs with similar names? iOS Music, on the other hand, does the expected and creates a station from the first played search result.

cmg• 5 months ago

The fact that in the miniplayer you can't display both the album art and the track information at the same time unless the cursor is hovering over the window absolutely boggles my mind. If I'm listening to a station, I want to glance over and see what I'm listening to. And I like the album art showing. This worked until Tahoe.

View menu > Hide Large Artwork will show the track info, but you of course lose the album art.

Of course it's not a major issue, it doesn't make the system unusable, but it was a nice little experience thing.

Marsymars2• 5 months ago

Apple Music has actually gone to "completely unusable" for my use.

I use it (or did, pre-Tahoe) to play iTunes-shared music over my network. Since Tahoe, it will play a couple (plus or minus a handful of songs) and then just stop rather than transitioning to the next song.

I've been listening to the actual radio for the past couple months because I haven't had the time to work out how to play my network-shared music.

apparent• 5 months ago

Good to know. My dad recently asked and I didn't know the pros/cons. I haven't upgraded but that's because I don't have a need to. He has a new Mac mini, and I thought it might make sense for him. But it sounds like it's not an upgrade, and is possibly a downgrade, especially if it will make things harder to find.

DavidPiper3• 5 months ago

I've also had a proper Thunderbolt display freak out where the entire desktop just suddenly decides to ultra-saturate/ultra-contrast. Happened twice, across restarts. After the second restart it stopped, but I can't explain it and nothing like it has happened before/since/with other machines I connect to the screen with the same cable.

Not sure about "harder to find" but the sheer number of unexplainable glitches and slowness means I wouldn't otherwise have upgraded had I known. Waiting for a higher 26.X release might be worthwhile.

charles_f• 5 months ago

I did the same mistake a few weeks ago ; my company enforces security updates and I picked the Tahoe update instead of the security one. I told myself, what the hell, might as well give it a try!

I wiped my computer and reinstalled Sequoia last week.

a012• 5 months ago

You’re lucky that you had a choice. The security policy in my company forces our laptop to be up to date no matter what. You can resist to update for some time but then they’ll force update through management system and sometime it happens in the middle of out meeting

userbinator• 5 months ago

Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro.

It's clear that no one at Apple (or any other big tech company these days) has ever watched old demoscene productions, then contemplated their performance against the available computing power of their current products and the experience thereof, and thought "something is very wrong".

psychoslave2• 5 months ago

I don't know, I started using a Mac only 3 years ago when joining my current job. The UX always felt so wrong on every matter to me. I don't get where the reputation came from, maybe from an era that was already only mere memory when I started to use it.

I would pick a default bare gnome 3 agaisnt any Mac os version UX without any hesitation.

With a lot of tools from third parties, it puts back the level to supportable, but that's the highest satisfaction level it ever procured to me. Rectangle and some alternative window switcher plus brew are the minimum to survive without going crazy after 2 minutes of exposition. Having finder always present in window switcher and no way to close/hide it? What a monstrosity!

I'm still looking for a working solution to select and paste with middle click.

Glad I don't have to use it out of work.

lapcat5• 5 months ago

I don't get where the reputation came from, maybe from an era that was already only mere memory when I started to use it.

Peak Mac design was 20 years ago, before iPhone. That was where the reputation came from.

Since iPhone became Apple's darling, and especially since Steve Jobs died, the Mac UI has been systematically wrecked, year by year. iPhone design has also been systematically wrecked since Jobs died. Tim Cook clearly had no idea what he was doing when he put hardware designer Jony Ive in charge of software with iOS 7, something that Jobs never did with Ive.

thunky2• 5 months ago

I would pick a default bare gnome 3 agaisnt any Mac os version UX without any hesitation.

Yeah it's a head scratcher for me too.

So many devs only want to work on a Mac yet they build software that runs on NOT Mac. Then they have to jump through hoops like architecture mismatch and docker having to run a Linux vm anyway.

wolvoleo4• 5 months ago

For me KDE, I can't deal with gnome especially 3. But yeah moving to KDE from Mac was a breath of fresh air. Finally options again to configure my computer the way I want it.

wpm3• 5 months ago

Alt-tab is an app switcher, not a window switcher, and Finder is always running, hence, it appears in alt-tab

Itoldmyselfso• 5 months ago

I also accidentally upgraded due dark pattern of auto-selecting Sequoia instead of update for Sonoma. Now my external monitor won't wake up when waking my macbook from sleep (in clamshell mode, lid always closed). Nothing fixes it, beyond infuriating.

pier252• 5 months ago

It's much easier to simply use this with whatever date you prefer:

    defaults write com.apple.SoftwareUpdate MajorOSUserNotificationDate -date "2030-03-03 12:00:00 +0000"

egb• 5 months ago

I've got that in place and still get the Tahoe popups, so there's some other mechanism here.

testing22321• 5 months ago

Same for me.

I setup a focus for do not disturb that runs from 12am to 11:59pm every Day.

Have not seen the popup on 4 weeks since I set it up

nottorp2• 5 months ago

Confirming. I tried that several times and it never sticks. Sequoia here.

pier252• 5 months ago

damn you're right :/

fidotron• 5 months ago

Same problem here.

Linux + KDE surpassed Windows many years ago, now I find I also prefer it to the Mac laptops, which are otherwise better only for portability.

Apple need to get their software act together. Such a shame because the hardware is awesome. A near perfect inversion of the era of Tiger on the G4.

OsrsNeedsf2P• 5 months ago

Linux + KDE has a significantly worse UI than Tahoe

coeneedell• 5 months ago

I’m gonna need a more detailed argument than that.

dotancohen2• 5 months ago

I'm a KDE user who is currently on his second stint using a Mac - the last was in 2017. I'm trying to be as objective as possible, but my list of "it works better on Linux" is far longer than the "it works better on Mac" list. I'd love to know your arguments.

blahgeek• 5 months ago

Apple is and always has been a hardware company. I would like to use the Linux ecosystem, however there’s simply no laptop other than Mac that is light and powerful and runs 15 hours in battery.

skydhash• 5 months ago

I much prefer to plug a charger every 5 hours (not that much of an inconvenience) than to suffer bad UX and distractions continuously.

dangus2• 5 months ago

The gap is narrowing every day. I would come close to saying this isn’t true anymore.

For example, the ASUS TUF A14 is only one hour shorter on the real world office productivity test than the M5 MacBook Pro:

https://youtu.be/3Q837Uclwp8

(Battery life section)

It also lasts longer than the M4 Pro MacBook Pro 14”.

Bonus points: it has replaceable, upgradable, DUAL full size SSD slots and replaceable WiFi card.

You’re also getting a better discrete graphics chip that you can use for higher performance applications, or go on still-good integrated graphics to get that great battery life.

Intel Panther Lake systems are rolling out and they have graphics performance slightly exceeding the M5 MacBook Pro along with excellent power efficiency.

Macs still win out on certain CPU benchmarks and certainly on creative benchmarks like video editing, but the truth of the matter is unless you’re making money editing videos, that doesn’t matter. It’s not like Apple chips are so far ahead that buying something else will make you sit in purgatory waiting for builds to complete.

I took the plunge recently and got off Mac. I was pleasantly surprised that, yes, other hardware is fine. Much of it is good, actually.

There are even PC laptops with haptic trackpads, but also, you really don’t need that. macOS has made itself require it by designing around it unnecessarily, presumably to sell more $150 external trackpads (e.g., a three finger swipe is really not easier to accomplish than a keyboard shortcut, it’s just overengineering).

Even if you can’t get the same battery life…that’s something a $50 external battery can solve, and I would suggest that anything above ~8 hours of battery is more of a nice to have than a necessity.

Is it 100% as good in every respect? No. But if you’d rather use Linux and the hardware is the only thing in your way, I’d start actually looking at other laptops to find one that works for you rather than assuming MacBooks as the best. (One of the challenges is that there are so many options once you leave Mac-land).

beacon2942• 5 months ago

I read the old forums carefully:

[BIG Warning: this didn't work for child commenter]

- simply decline/reject the TOS on install. It will auto uninstall the installer and go away.

Life has been good since.

1f60c• 5 months ago

I TRUSTED YOU! Nooooooooo!

Anyway, I hope you're happy.

(I thought it would show me a TOS prompt again, but it did not. My bad.)

beacon2942• 5 months ago

What? Let me put this warning in the top comment. I got one.

xbar• 5 months ago

Thank you. I own several Macs. One is on Tahoe. It feels the worst. More than myself, though, I need to give my less technical family members a respite from the tricky traps that lead to inadvertently installing it.

n8cpdx2• 5 months ago

As bad as it is, I don't think it is bad in ways that non technical users are likely to notice unfortunately. Mostly because I think years of horrible software have trained people to not have expectations.

Tahoe is still a breath of fresh air compared to Windows, and iOS 26 is still great compared to Android (as I've unfortunately learned from a failed switch attempt).

mjorgers• 5 months ago

What makes you say that about Android? I’m a iOS user, but was under the impression that Android was already quite polished, especially the stock experience (as it is with pixel phones)

kjuulh• 5 months ago

Upgrading to Sequoia was a mistake, and so was upgrading to Tahoe.

I like new and shiny software, but these two releases aren't great. Outside of a good amount of bugs. It is wild to me that Apple can't even get their own UI consistent.

Apples own apps are pretty much the only things you can't close. Finder: can't quit. System settings, somehow doesn't expand horizontally (are we still in the 2000s apple?) I haven't felt the liquid glass or whatever too much on the laptop, but I just used one of my family members Iphone today, and man it was distracting, it seems crazy that contrast has gone out the window.

But especially the bugs. Apple should really take a release that is just bug fixing. I had to switch out Spotlight because it kept trying to want to index my entire system, which is hard when you work in both Rust and typescript projects (lots of small files).

roughly• 5 months ago

I’ve been a pretty die hard Mac user for 25-odd years now (I own a HomePod, for fuck sake), but this is the first time I’ve taken pains to _not_ update to the latest OS. The Tahoe UI/UX is really just inexcusable, and nothing else I’ve heard or seen makes me willing to put up with it. I’m very much hoping they course correct soon, but as sits, my Linux box is suddenly starting to look like the future.

halapro2• 5 months ago

I'm the guy who installs OS betas on their main/only devices (going back to Windows Vista beta) and I don’t think I'll be installing this OS anytime soon. I'm more hoping that they get their act together by September 2026's release.

dzink3• 5 months ago

Dear Apple, no latency from brain to action is the greatest design you can possibly have. We want to feel one with the machine. That's the greatest joy and difference between a Mac and a Windows machine. Adding latency to the fastest machine possible is criminal. Please STOP DOING IT with unnecessary animations.

halapro2• 5 months ago

I think you're in the wrong ecosystem if you don't like animations. Over the top animations have been at the core of Apple, I still remember the "drop in the water" animation of OS X Tiger's Dashboard. 20 years ago.

dijit• 5 months ago

I think you're overselling it, the minimise? Sure.

But I can't think of a single animation that added a delay to processing on MacOS.

Compare to say, Windows, at least.

dzink3• 5 months ago

I use their accessibility features to stop all animations I can. Maybe if more people upvote here they will hear us. No point in suffering in silence.

JSR_FDED• 5 months ago

I’ve used Little Snitch to block the installation of Tahoe. I get a notification every few days, it when I click on it there’s a message that it can’t download the update. Massive stress reducer knowing I can’t accidentally upgrade to Tahoe.

lapcat5• 5 months ago

I get a notification every few days

Blocking mobileassetd should stop that:

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/1/6.html

schmeichel• 5 months ago

Out of curiosity, how did you go about doing that? That sounds really nice and I'd be interested to see if it could work with LuLu as well.

post-it• 5 months ago

Adding my opinion: Sequoia was fine and so is Tahoe on a base M2. Can't say I've noticed a usability difference. I also prefer using a trackpad over a mouse and I don't know very many keyboard shortcuts, and I only use one monitor.

CharlesW• 5 months ago

I'm happy to report that Tahoe is also no slower on M1 Macs.

celsoazevedo• 5 months ago

Some animations (eg: a popup) are choppy on our M1 Macbook Air. I wonder why it's smooth for some, but not for others.

dirasieb• 5 months ago

no issues here either, macbook air m4 + 2k 180hz monitor + a bunch of usb and bluetooth peripherals

the only thing i miss from sequoia so far is the launchpad, but i've already adapted to just using spotlight

travisvn• 5 months ago

Hey everyone, I'm the owner of the repo that Rob references in his blog post (https://github.com/travisvn/stop-tahoe-update)

Just wanted to comment to see if I can help answer any questions as well as mentioning that we improved the instructions in the README based on some of the points Rob made a few weeks back.

There really are a large number of us out there that know Tahoe would be a downgrade to their current setup

If you have any ideas on how to improve the resilience of the workarounds, please connect on the GitHub, or just starring the repo would help, as the project would get more attention and hopefully more solutions offered as a result.

It's frustrating to feel like your computer isn't.. yours anymore when you're pushed so insistently like with this "upgrade". Hopefully we can figure out some sustainable ways to get some autonomy back.

the-mitr• 5 months ago

Thanks for your work!

tempodox• 5 months ago

I just wanted to thank you for this work. I wouldn’t have known where to start. Reading about all the hoops to jump through I can’t help but think that macOS is getting ever closer to being malware, just like Windows. An OS you have to fight to stay productive. I’ve been a Mac user since 1995, but the way this has been going over so many years now, I can’t imagine my next computer to be yet another Mac any more. I have been forced to view Linux as the last refuge. It was nice while it lasted, but eventually Stallman was right the whole time.

MagerValp• 5 months ago

You’ll be disappointed to learn that the deferral is 90 days from the release of the major OS version, not 90 days from when the configuration is set. There appears to be a bug in the delay logic in 15.7.3, but you really shouldn’t be running that — there are some important security fixes in 15.7.4.

p_ing4• 5 months ago

Not all security fixes are backported so unfortunately if you’re concerned about vulnerabilities, updating to the current release OS is a requirement.

https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/software-update-p...

lapcat5• 5 months ago

On the other hand, not all new security vulnerabilities are backported either.

Do you think that new major OS versions introduce only fixes and not bugs?

I think version N-1 is a good balance between getting the fixes and avoiding the new bugs.

evolve2k• 5 months ago

At the 90 days, err do we (can we?) run it again and get another 90 days?

Would be good to clarify this in the README. So appreciate your work btw.

dont__panic• 5 months ago

Much easier: switch to the Sequoia public beta channel!

burnt-resistor• 5 months ago

Exactly. I was going to write this. The "beta" channel, once RTM, becomes the release channel of that version.

bouke• 5 months ago

I'm curious about what updates will get pushed through that channel. Is it just RTM updates, or will it also include beta updates? It's currently offering 15.7.5 through that channel.

kgwgk• 5 months ago

Thanks for the idea. Now MacOS is happy and so am I.

seabass• 5 months ago

A few weeks ago Apple had a tiny (<10MB) update for media codecs ready to install on my MBP. I expanded the details for that software update and saw that if I had run it, it would also have downloaded and installed Tahoe. Apple is burning so much trust right now with these dark patterns.

treesknees• 5 months ago

It’s been like that for several years.

fuzzythinker• 5 months ago

Comments here paints Tahoe very poorly, and I trust comments here on this topic. This is very bad for Apple as OS from new Macs can not be downgraded and customers like myself will either delay purchases til hopefully next OS fix these issues (not having high hopes) or buy in the 2nd hand market for older OS.

brandonmenc• 5 months ago

I held out.

Then I upgraded my work laptop to test it out. Then my phone. Now my personal laptop.

I actually like it.

Everything is snappier. The glass effects are not nearly as annoying as I expected.

ymmv

techacolyte42• 5 months ago

I got a work computer that was on Sonoma and had to update. Was prepared to be angry, especially after the time spent updating, and then it's eh, fine. The picture of Lake Tahoe makes me happy.

nottorp2• 5 months ago

Hmm. You get to see the desktop picture. You only run one application at a time and close it when finished then?

I suppose Tahoe's performance regressions wouldn't count then.

jedberg• 5 months ago

Interesting, I'm running Sequoia and have never seen that.

However, I'm running Sequoa developer beta. In my system settings under Beta updates, I have "Sequoia developer beta" selected.

At this point it's basically just getting the Sequoa security patches a few days early. But I guess it also suppresses this message?

nikcub• 5 months ago

so we're all going to hold onto sequoia like we did snow leopard. only reason i'm not buying a new mac at the moment is because it would force me to upgrade.

the situation is absurd ..

fwiw switching to the sequoia beta channel in system settings killed the nag notifications for me (I believe the profile as defined in OP will stop all updates - which you probably don't want)

ProllyInfamous4• 5 months ago

My historic "sticking points" have been macOS 9.1, 10.8, 10.13, & presently 13.2

I'm getting old enough that it's rational thinking: pre-AI/pre-Tahoe operating systems will be accompany me into death.

lapcat5• 5 months ago

But you probably don't want to receive all and only beta updates either, which is what the beta channel will give you.

olyjohn2• 5 months ago

Might as well just rip off the band aid and learn to suck it up. Fixing Windows and MacOS with these fucking shitty hacks and doesn't work forever. You will be upgraded, like it or not, or be harassed the rest of your life to do so.

ProllyInfamous4• 5 months ago

Just use a PiHole to block Apple, entirely.

(\.|^)apple\.com$

LittleSnitch is not enough for such a systemwide block.

notpushkin3• 5 months ago

Run the script as described in the project's Read Me

I don’t think this warrants a whole installer script – if you replace UUIDs by hand, you can as well read through the .mobileconfig file and make sure you understand what the profile does, then double click it to install :)

Note that you might also want to remove some other entries from the profile, as, from a glance, those might still delay minor updates by 30 days. (Or does `forceDelayedSoftwareUpdates=false` make these harmless?)

silvestrov• 5 months ago

Note that step 3 is not needed anymore (replacing UUID by hand) as the script automatically was updated 2 months ago to do that automatically.

lupinglade• 5 months ago

Apple has been going down hill at an exponential rate since the loss of Steve (and subsequently just about all real engineers at Apple).

Swift is turning into a mess and SwiftUI is complete, utter garbage. Tahoe’s UI is unbearable.

The problem is there is no real alternative - Linux is the closest thing (but has its issues).

hedora2• 5 months ago

I’ve got two linux desktops and a mac. Combined, the linux desktops hit issues far less often than the mac.

The Linux desktop environment I use (LXDE) is not perfect, but it hits fewer issues than Mac OS. For instance, my Linux box doesn’t try to melt due to finder reindexing, and alt-tab works. Also, I don’t have to position the mouse cursor outside the window to resize (that bug predates tahoe, fwiw). I haven’t had any system services or local IPC crap wedge on Linux like they do on MacOS (I have seen systemd wedge those sorts of things, so I don’t use it).

The integration with iMessage, Notes, Photos and phone calls are clear wins for the mac, but that’s about it.

Some people would say you need nvidia+linux for local inference, but, in practice, AMD iGPU and Apple Silicon both work well (and you can get 32GB of unified ram for much less than a 32GB video card), and the ecosystems are fine. So, I’d call that a tie for anything that can reasonably be called a personal computer or workstation. Some people would argue Linux wins.

If you grab a copy of devuan and slap steam on top of it, then it’ll be able to run far more commercial and open source games than MacOS.

As a daily driver, Linux on a modern vanilla SoC box comes with far less day-to-day hassle. (It’s getting the same level of “we actually tried this exact config” as MacOS does.)

Anyway, I wouldn’t really claim Linux has “issues” vs macos at this point.

sunaookami• 5 months ago

Still on Sonoma, don't plan to upgrade, I'm sick of upgrades that break everything or change the UI for the worse. Does anyone know how to block the "there is a new version" popup for Pages etc?

ProllyInfamous4• 5 months ago

This is my favorite PiHole rule (DNS blacklist):

    (\.|^)apple\.com$

One can then manually install OS updates, directly from Apple, via <https://mrmacintosh.com/how-to-download-macos-catalina-mojav...> directlinks (should one choose to).

warpspin• 5 months ago

There were times when we couldn't await to upgrade to the next Mac OS version. Tahoe is not one of those versions.

Already iOS 26 made me consider switching to Android, and now I've pondered returning to Linux after 26 years on Mac OS. Bizarrely, right now it's the quality of the hardware alone holding me at Mac OS. Wouldn't have expected that 6 or 7 years ago.

Sick of the forced UI refreshes and "modern" designs. Will Apple understand again this is where I work and basically live in and not some kind of entertainment system where I need design refreshes so it feels all shiny and new?

sgt• 5 months ago

I just don't get the resistance to Tahoe, and I speak as a macOS power user through a couple decades.

Been on Tahoe now for a few weeks. The new rounded corners bug me a bit, but aside from that it's been rock stable. The trick with macOS is of course not to immediately upgrade. Give it a few weeks before you go to a new release.

I've been through all the releases since Jaguar in 2003. There's been some ups and downs, and a lot of complaints, but I'd say it still remains the most rock solid UNIX™ desktop OS out there.

troad• 5 months ago

I'm not a huge fan of Tahoe's aesthetics, but the response has been near hysterical. It's fine. Apple has done much worse (iOS 7 - present).

I wish some of the anger being directed at rounded corners would be redirected at the rapidly accumulating list of long-standing bugs in macOS instead.

skort• 5 months ago

but I'd say it still remains the most rock solid UNIX™ desktop OS out there

That doesn't mean that they aren't still constantly making it worse.

Apple themselves note that most of the new features in the OS are "design" and "apple intelligence". I really don't care for these features, so I don't really care to upgrade. Even on the Tahoe page, they note many of the features as updates to individual apps themselves, so why can't they just release those as individual app updates?

I'd rather have a solid OS with a UI that isn't re-imagined every other year with more focus on usability improvements and bug fixes. And as you note, it is one of the most solid UNIX™ desktop OS'.

So when Apple puts out a major update that I think is going in the wrong direction, how else should I signal my distaste? I sent feedback. I posted on their customer forums (which are a terrible place for discussion btw). Now I just want to not update, but they use dark patterns to try to force it on me. So I'm going to be more annoying and vocal about it because I think they can and should do better.

gib4442• 5 months ago

Also need a solution for Numbers nagging me in the app to upgrade (popup blocking my work).

So annoying. I don't want the Numbers-with-AI/premium-upsell-crap edition

Anyone in London want to buy a 32GB M4 MBA at a big discount (got some cosmetic damage)...?

mberning• 5 months ago

The constant, exhausting, and frankly pointless changes to macos is really driving me back to rolling my own desktop on freebsd or linux. At least under that environment nothing changes unless I change it.

Fethbita2• 5 months ago

The biggest annoyance for me is the removal of Firewire support with Tahoe. That’s why I keep Sequoia for the time being. I’ll probably create a new APFS volume and dual boot with Sequoia for the foreseeable future for Firewire support.

delecti2• 5 months ago

What mac hardware still has Firewire ports? My exposure to their hardware is mostly limited to the Macbooks of coworkers and family members, but I didn't realize there was any overlap between Tahoe support (seems to only go back to hardware released around 2020) and Firewire ports (seems to only go forward to hardware released around 2012).

Fethbita2• 5 months ago

Thunderbolt port still supports Firewire, so if you have the correct adapters, you can connect your old Firewire camcorder to digitize cassettes, but with Tahoe, Apple removed the Firewire drivers so they no longer work.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504994

eviks• 5 months ago

Now I just have to type notahoe every 90 days,

Can to not set up a scheduled task instead to avoid little garbage like this distracting your precious brain?

Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts

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