Summary

Gruber explains why he refuses to upgrade from MacOS 15 Sequoia to MacOS 26 Tahoe, citing numerous severe UI regressions including distracting menu icons, excessive transparency, overly rounded window corners, and poor app icons. He notes that the only Tahoe feature he genuinely wants is the Journal app for Mac, which isn't enough to justify the downgrade in experience. He examines a newly discovered Finder feature in Tahoe that auto-resizes column view widths to fit filenames, but finds it buggy and half-baked — exhibiting layering glitches and lacking the refinement expected of a Mac. He concludes that even good ideas in Tahoe are undermined by poor execution, reinforcing his view that the release is best avoided.

Key Insight

Even when MacOS 26 Tahoe introduces genuinely good ideas like auto-resizing Finder columns, the buggy, unpolished execution only reinforces that the release is a step backward from Sequoia.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 7

  Why choose to suffer?

• 6

  What is there to actually like about Tahoe?

• 5

  Everything is perfectly cromulent running iOS 26 on my iPhone and iPad, but sticking with MacOS 15 Sequoia on my primary Mac.

• 4

  It feels like an early prototype for what could be a polished feature.

• 7

  The way Tahoe works, where the column doesn't move and the text editing field for the filename just gets drawn on top of the sidebar, feels gross, like I'm using a computer that is not a Macintosh. Amateur hour.

• 6

  After 30-some years of columns that don't automatically adjust their widths, I can wait another year.

• 6

  The unpolished version of the feature we have today only reiterates my belief that Tahoe is a mistake to be avoided.

• 7

  It's a good idea though, and there aren't even many of those in Tahoe.

Tone

critical