macOS 26 Tahoe: The MacStories Review

I’m going to cut to the chase – I like macOS 26 Tahoe a lot. No, it’s not perfect, and yes, I wish Apple had done even more, but that’s the case every year.

What I love about Tahoe is its balance. It’s not the sort of thing you can draw up a set of specs or a table of pros and cons for. It just feels right.

The heart of why Tahoe works is that it meets users where they are better than the typical annual release. If you’ve been using macOS for years and prefer to follow a beaten path through its features, you can. You may stumble across a new feature now and then, and you’ll notice visual differences thanks to Liquid Glass, but I’ve been moving between macOS Sequoia and Tahoe all summer long, and when I’m not seeking out what’s new, everything simply feels familiar and comfortable. That’s a good thing for an OS that’s relied upon by millions of people to get their work done.

But you’re probably wondering how I can say that given the Liquid Glass design and online drama surrounding it over the summer. The thing is, whether you’re a Liquid Glass fan or foe, it’s just not as big of a deal on the Mac as it is elsewhere. I’ll explain what I like about Liquid Glass and what I don’t, but it hasn’t moved the needle at all when it comes to my daily work.

[Tahoe is] a release that walks a careful line between the familiar and the new.

What has moved the needle are the new features available in Tahoe. They won’t get in the way of your existing workflows, but if you’re interested iprn exploring new and better ways of getting things done, there’s a lot to like about this update. That’s why I’m such a big fan of macOS 26: it’s a release that walks a careful line between the familiar and the new. There’s no adjustment period, but there are plenty of new features to explore that I think will make a big difference in the way MacStories readers use their Macs.

So join me for a tour off the beaten path to explore what you can expect to discover in macOS 26 Tahoe.

Exclusive Extras & Support MacStories

eBooks, Making-Of, Drafts Actions, and Apple Intelligence Shortcuts

As we do every year, we’ve put together some fun extras to make this week extra special for Club MacStories members who want to dive deeper into this year’s OS updates and reviews. And for Club MacStories Plus and Premier members, we’ve got even more in store to help you improve your automations and workflows using techniques from Federico’s review, as well as exclusive ways to experience our other OS reviews.

Today, Club MacStories members can download a complete, interactive eBook edition of iOS and iPadOS 26: The MacStories Review to read on their favorite device or app. And this Saturday, Club Members will receive a special edition of our MacStories Weekly newsletter featuring a behind-the-scenes making-of story with details on how Federico researched, wrote, and compiled his review of iOS and iPadOS 26, including his use of Drafts, Notion, LLMs, and more.

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Apple Intelligence shortcuts will be released next week.

Club MacStories Plus and Premier members get even more perks.

Throughout the week, members will receive a set of eBook editions of the macOS 26 Tahoe, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26 reviews from the MacStories team to read however they like. And next week, Federico will publish two special stories exclusively for Club Plus and Premier members: a collection of Drafts actions he used to make his review and a new lesson in the Automation Academy centered on Apple Intelligence shortcuts, showcasing the new ‘Use Model’ action and teaching members how to take advantage of it themselves.

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The support of our Club members throughout the year means the world to us and helps make it possible for the MacStories team to do what we do. In addition to the exclusive content we publish for Club members year-round, we look forward to offering extra perks like these alongside each fall’s reviews.

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For more details on Club MacStories and this year’s extras, you can read our full breakdown here.

[table_of_contents]

Liquid Glass

Two very different Liquid Glass implementations.

Before getting to the new features Tahoe has to offer, I think it’s worth examining the OS’s design changes. Liquid Glass, the marketing term Apple uses to describe a collection of visual changes to its OSes, was revealed with great fanfare at WWDC.

If you were paying attention at all over the summer, you probably came across your fair share of hot takes for and against Liquid Glass. There were a lot of opinions, and most were as reductive in their substance as Apple’s marketing term for the design language is itself. Liquid Glass isn’t like an Instagram filter that’s been applied across the Mac’s UI. Instead, it’s a collection of changes big and small that differ in their look across every Apple platform.

Liquid Glass also employs different elements depending on the context and app. However, it isn’t always clear why one treatment is used in one context and not another. That makes Liquid Glass a little hard to evaluate. But, “Beta Summer” is over, and Tahoe has been released, so let’s dig in and examine it more closely to see what works, what doesn’t, and what the future may hold.

Windows, Sidebars, and Toolbars

The Finder’s new Liquid Glass look.

I want to start with the Finder because everyone spends a lot of time there, making it an app that Apple’s designers need to get right.

Here’s an example from Sequoia of my Recents folder running against the backdrop of one of Apple’s built-in wallpapers.

The Finder in macOS Sequoia.

You can see that the sidebar and toolbar both take on some of the colors of the wallpaper, but they’re more opaque than not. For example, the video and WAV file icons in the top row don’t show through the Finder’s toolbar.

Now, let’s look at a similar screenshot from macOS Tahoe using one of its built-in wallpapers.

The Finder in macOS Tahoe.

Like the last screenshot, this one has no windows behind it. You can see that the wallpaper shines through the sidebar and toolbar more than it does on Sequoia. This is a folder of screenshots, and you can clearly make out each rectangle sitting behind the sidebar and extending into the toolbar. However, they don’t obscure the buttons in the toolbar because those aren’t nearly as translucent as the empty spaces surrounding them.

Close-up of the Finder’s toolbar button groupings.

There are other differences, too. Button groupings are always visible in Tahoe, whereas they only appear on hover in Sequoia. The preview panel also displays more metadata for some file types in Tahoe. Plus, the corners of Tahoe’s windows are rounder than Sequoia’s.

The two Finder windows certainly look different, but I wouldn’t say the Finder is worse because of the changes. Both are perfectly readable to my eye. I also appreciate the depth effect that the distinct layers offer. They form clear boundaries between each element, making items like buttons easier to distinguish from their surrounding labels, chrome, and content.

The Finder in list view.

The Finder in icon view.

However, Finder comes with an asterisk. I use it with the tab bar visible most of the time, whether I’m using tabs or not. I also almost always use a list view in Finder. What I discovered when I turned off the tab bar and switched to an icon grid view was that the Finder toolbar and buttons became far more transparent. Dark file icons are more noticeable beneath the toolbar, and text becomes more of a distraction. I wouldn’t say the difference makes the Finder unusable, but it does strike me as an inconsistent design approach. I can’t think of any reason why icons and their labels should shine through the toolbar and its buttons more than a list view or any view with tabs enables, but here we are. Hopefully, Apple harmonizes these views in a future update.

Safari on Sequoia.

Safari on Tahoe.

I’m not going to walk you through every system app because the patterns are pretty clear, but I do have a couple more examples to share. The first is Safari. Like in the Finder, Tahoe’s toolbar and sidebar are more translucent, and the corners of the window are rounder. With Safari though, the utility of the always-visible button groupings is even more apparent.

Sequoia’s Safari extension buttons were just a collection of random toolbar icons that took on a button shape when you hovered over them. With Tahoe, the extension buttons are grouped, providing a more cohesive look to the toolbar that I like a lot. As with the Finder, the more opaque button backgrounds make them easy to read, and the layering of buttons and the sidebar sets both off from the webpage you’re viewing.

Another design change that distinguishes Safari in Tahoe from Sequoia relates to tabs. Tahoe’s browser tabs have been rounded so they look more like sunken pills in a slot above the browser content than tabs of paper folders. It looks great, separating the tabs from the browser content better than before and doing a good job of distinguishing the active tab from others.

Now, let’s take a look at an app that I think Tahoe makes look worse: Music. One of the stated goals of Liquid Glass is to unify the styles of each of Apple’s OSes. Music shows what happens when that goal isn’t balanced with the unique characteristics of the hardware on which an OS runs.

Here’s Music on Sequoia and Tahoe:

Music on Sequoia.

Music on Tahoe.

The big difference, besides the common stylistic changes to window elements, is that the playback controls have been moved to the bottom and placed in a pill-shaped rectangle that is much more transparent than the Finder and Safari toolbars that I showed off above. This raises more questions than it answers. Why move the controls to the bottom? That may be the natural place for playback controls on iOS and iPadOS, but not macOS, especially when it means overlaying them against the constantly changing and visually busy backdrop of the Apple Music catalog. Another good example of this problem is Photos, which has very transparent buttons that fight with the background for your attention.

Like Music, controls in Photos often get lost in your sea of images.

Also, why aren’t the backgrounds of the controls more opaque like they are in the toolbars of the Finder and Sequoia? I like the separation that those toolbars create from the files and web content I’m browsing in those apps; in contrast, Music not only moves the controls where they don’t need to be, but it makes them much harder to read. A good example of an app that overlays controls directly on content and does a much better job is Maps, which has buttons on the right side of the window that conform more closely to the style of the Finder and Safari examples above.

Maps uses a better way to overlay buttons on content.

Reminders also handles transparency better than Music. As you scroll your lists, you’ll see a task’s text behind the toolbar and very subtly behind buttons and text fields, but the reduced transparency of those elements makes the text far less disruptive than in Music.

Reminders’ translucent toolbar in Tahoe.

Music raises a larger question. There are other apps with Liquid Glass implementations like Music and Photos, such as FaceTime, Home, and Podcasts, but most system apps follow the Finder/Safari design pattern. Does that make apps like Music outliers, or are they the start of a trend that will spread in future iterations of macOS? Only Apple knows the answer for certain.

What I hope, though, is that Apple’s design team reconsiders Music and the other transparency-heavy apps in Tahoe. I like Liquid Glass’ pronounced transparency on the iPhone and iPad better than on the Mac. Perhaps it’s because I sit farther away from my Mac’s screen than I typically hold the screens of my iPhone and iPad, but if I had a vote at the design meeting, I’d push for moving more in the direction of the Finder and Safari style than Music.

The Dock, App Switcher, and Icons

The Tahoe Dock.

The Tahoe App Switcher.

Two places where I think maximum transparency works better are the Dock and App Switcher. In both cases, the content underneath shines through, and although I expect some people will find it distracting, I don’t. The icons are large enough and opaque, which makes a big difference.

Speaking of icons, Apple has redesigned its system app icons so they all fit neatly in a squircle. The glyphs have been modified, and you’ll notice light reflecting off the edges of the icons, which are generally more abstract than the versions that came before them. Some are better than others, but I don’t feel strongly about them one way or the other.

Pixelmator Pro in the icon “shame box.”

However, you’ll also notice that some of your third-party apps, and even some Apple apps such as Final Cut Pro and Pixelmator Pro, have had their icons shrunken to fit against the backdrop of a gray squircle. As a means of coercing developers to adopt the new format, I’m sure this tactic will work, but I don’t like it. It’s heavy-handed and makes the user experience worse. I only have a few apps in my Dock that are living in what Jason Snell calls the icon “shame box,” and I expect that number to dwindle rapidly now that Tahoe has been released, but I do wish Apple had chosen a different route for moving icon design to where the company wants it to go.

Another place you’ll find more iconography is in app menus. Apple has included iconography in some menus in past iterations of the OS, such as Messages’ View menu, but there are a lot more icons now. Just look at Preview running on macOS Tahoe:

Preview’s File menu in macOS Tahoe.

The glyphs can be a little small depending on your display resolution settings, but I like the added visual cues they provide. Thanks to Apple’s years of work on SF Symbols, the glyphs fit in nicely with macOS’ system-wide typeface, too.

Menu Bar and Control Center

The transparent menu bar is readable with all of Apple’s built-in wallpapers.

By default, the menu bar is now transparent. Early in the beta cycle, Apple added the option to change it back to the semi-transparent style found in Sequoia. If you’re worried about what a busy wallpaper might do to the legibility of your menu bar icons, you may be pleasantly surprised to find the gradient behind the menu bar that dims your wallpaper at the top of the screen is enough to make it legible. If not, you can always switch back to the old style. I’m glad there’s an option to turn on the Sequoia-like look, but I’m more glad that the transparent menu bar stuck, because it looks great.

User Customization and Personalization

That’s a lot of purple.

The changes to the look of macOS Tahoe don’t end with Apple’s standard screen elements because, more than ever before, users can adjust their Macs’ UI to their liking. For example, you could go all in on purple like I did above, tinting system controls, folders, and even app icons to match your wallpaper. The possibilities are vast.

You can even customize your Tahoe Lock Screen with alternative fonts similar to the options on the iPhone and iPad.

Icons can be displayed in their default colors, or with dark, clear, or tinted looks. There are nine theme colors, nine text highlight colors, and eight folder color options, plus a choose-your-own option for highlights and folders if the built-in options aren’t enough. Folder color follows your theme color by default, but they can be overridden, and all the other customization settings can be set independently of one another. You can even change the Lock Screen font and pick from 15 new screensavers that can be used as wallpapers, too.

So go wild if you want. It’s fun to experiment with, even if you like the Mac’s default color scheme. Who knows? Maybe you’ll stumble on the next big macOS aesthetic trend and blow up on TikTok.

System Features

macOS Tahoe comes with a wide array of new and improved system features and apps. I want to kick things off with system-level features because that’s where the most exciting action is this year.

The Menu Bar and Control Center

Control Center (and the menu bar) are highly customizable with loads of system controls.

In the previous section, I covered the changes to how the menu bar looks. It’s transparent by default, which I like, but there are a bunch of other changes that affect it and Control Center that I expect a lot of readers will enjoy.

First of all, Control Center controls have been greatly expanded and can occupy multiple spots along the menu bar. There are controls to set timers, run shortcuts, tile your windows, create notes in the Notes app, record voice memos, and much more. To manage the changes, there’s a new Control Center gallery that can be accessed by clicking on the Control Center icon in the menu bar and then ‘Edit Controls’. That opens a UI that looks a lot like the widget gallery. There’s a sidebar on the left for searching for controls and browsing by app. The remainder of the window displays the available controls grouped by app.

When you hover over a control, a green ‘+’ button appears that will add it to Control Center when clicked. Alternatively, you can drag a control and place it wherever you’d like in your current Control Center panel or drag it to the menu bar, which will add it as a standalone menu bar item.

I created a separate HomeKit Control Center panel for HomeKit accessories and scenes.

If you’d prefer to create multiple Control Center panels containing a variety of controls, you can do that, too. The Control Center gallery also displays a ‘+’ button in your menu bar, which will start a new panel where you can add controls. Each panel can be assigned one of 11 icons to distinguish it from your others. That’s not a lot of icons to choose from, but you can include repeats if you’d like. It’s worth noting that if you set up a new Control Center panel and don’t add any controls, it will simply disappear when you dismiss the Control Center gallery. Also, sliders for volume and display brightness, which used to appear in the middle of your screen now, appear below the Control Center button in your menu bar with a nice animation; I think it’s a better place for them, although it’s been a little hard to get used to.

Volume and display brightness sliders appear beneath the Control Center menu bar icon when adjusted from your keyboard.

These features create a new menu bar dynamic. Multiple Control Center panels effectively allow you to stack a lot of menu bar items under one icon, saving space that’s at a premium on smaller displays. At the same time, however, Tahoe is adding more ways to fill your menu bar than ever before. To help ease the tension, there are new options in the Menu Bar section of System Settings. You can enter the Control Center gallery from there, but more importantly, you can use this section to turn off menu bar items even if they don’t give you that option in their own settings.

There are many new settings for managing your menu bar in Tahoe.

You’ve probably been there. You have some peripheral or app that insists it needs to live in your menu bar 24/7. The reality is that the list of must-have menu bar items is different for everyone. I, for one, welcome the ability to banish ScanSnap and Adobe Creative Cloud, along with several other apps, from my menu bar.

A Drafts control panel.

One feature announced at WWDC that you’ll have a hard time finding in this update is third-party Control Center controls. They’re so rare that I’ve only found two: the text editor Drafts (this week’s site sponsor) and the screenshot capture app ScreenFloat. I’ve tried a lot of Mac betas over the summer, and as we rolled into September, I figured that the third-party controls feature was being delayed or there was a bug preventing them from showing up because I had yet to see one. Nope. To be certain, I checked over 70 betas of all kinds – AppKit apps, SwiftUI apps, Catalyst apps, iPad apps running in compatibility mode, you name it – but nothing new turned up, except these two apps.

Update: Since publishing this review, I discovered with the help of the indie developer community that the lack of third-party controls in Control Center is a bug in macOS Tahoe, which you can read more about here. The fix, at least for some people, is to open the macOS widget gallery, which seems to refresh the Control Center gallery. Hopefully, this but will be resolved in an update soon.

Drafts and ScreenFloat show it can be done, and I’m sure there are others, but they are very rare. Drafts offers controls to start a new draft, create a draft from the clipboard, dictate a draft, scan a document, search, open your last draft, open the app, open your default workspace, or open any of the individual notes inside your Drafts library. ScreenFloat has a lot too, with controls to capture the entire screen, an area of a screen, import a screenshot from the clipboard or an iOS device, open the app’s Shots Browser, and record a selected area of your screen. That’s a lot, and to be clear, the same functionality is available in Drafts’ and ScreenFloat’s separate menu bar apps, but now, users have the choice to add just the actions they use to Control Center, which I appreciate.

I opened a lot of betas looking for ones that support Control Center. In the end, I found two.

When I was having trouble finding third-party controls, I started asking around. From what I’ve been able to gather, few developers have worked on controls, and of those that have, at least some are struggling to get them to work properly. I hope that changes because I think the redesigned Control Center has a lot of potential. I love the flexibility of creating multiple Control Center panels and the option to drop one-off controls directly on the menu bar. It won’t replace a third-party menu bar organization utility for everyone, but it brings the core functionality of those sorts of apps to more users. The transition fits well with the direction Apple has taken with Shortcuts and App Intents, placing discrete bits of functionality at users’ fingertips, meeting them where they work and where they prefer to access their apps.

It’s a work in process, but this is my current main Control Center panel, a mix of system controls and controls from Drafts and ScreenFloat.

Personally, I’ve set up a Control Center panel with frequently used settings, such as Focus modes, display and sound controls, media controls, HomeKit scenes, and more. A separate Home control includes the lights and other smart home controls I use most from my desk. While I recognize that the changes to the menu bar and Control Center won’t be enough for everyone, they’ve meant that I no longer need to use a menu bar utility with my Mac. I’m happy with the default and don’t plan to go back.

One last note on Control Center panels is that on the Studio Display, they only reach about halfway down the screen. Seeing that, my first reaction was that I wished they were longer. I’m sure there are users who would love to fill all of their screens’ vertical space with controls from their favorite apps and stack one shortcut on top of another. Having lived with the new Control Center over the summer, though, I think limiting the height was the right decision. A longer panel would be hard to parse and wouldn’t fit on laptops anyway. By standardizing on a size that works across various Macs, Tahoe’s Control Center will make transitioning between different setups easier for users, which is the right choice.

The Flighty Live Activity projected from my iPhone to the menu bar.

And finally, before leaving the realm of the menu bar, I want to mention Live Activities. I applaud Apple’s efforts to bring whatever is happening on your iPhone to the Mac with Continuity features like this one. It reduces distractions, and in many cases – like the new Phone app for Mac that I’ll get to – the integrations are remarkably useful. However, many times, I’ve found the menu bar text to be far too small for Live Activities to be useful. If you click on an activity, it expands below the menu bar and is much more functional, but the shrunken down menu bar-height UI needs to be reconsidered. It’s too small and easy to ignore. However, I do like that you can use a Live Activity to launch iPhone Mirroring and interact with the app from your Mac.

Overall, I’m a big fan of the direction the menu bar is heading. I like the transparency as well as the new customizability and flexibility of both the menu bar and Control Center. The expansion of system controls for Control Center makes it far more useful, too, but the lack of third-party support going into the Tahoe launch is disappointing. I hope that changes soon because I prefer using controls that I can place in a Control Center panel or pin as standalone menu bar items to the existing lineup of individual icons. Controls won’t make sense for every menu bar app, but they do for enough that widespread adoption would make it easier for users to manage their menu bars on smaller screens, which would be a big win. Let’s hope that emerges over the coming year and beyond.

Spotlight

Spotlight: The Same, but Different.

The new Spotlight is fantastic. It’s not that I had anything in particular against Spotlight before; I just didn’t find it very useful compared to third-party alternatives. In recent years, most of its additions were data sources that made it easy to do things like pull up details about a place or an actor. Those features worked well enough, but they weren’t a good replacement for web search and, more recently, querying a large language model.

Tahoe’s Spotlight is different. The web search-adjacent features are still there for those who use them, but this year, Spotlight’s focus is on productivity, and the team behind the feature nailed it.

There are two axes that underpin Spotlight’s success: the first is the breadth of the feature’s capabilities, and the second is how you accomplish tasks.

Launching Numbers under Sequoia.

Let’s start with what can be done because there’s so much that it’s been broken into categories within Spotlight for the first time. As before, Spotlight can be used to launch apps; what’s changed is the depth of what you can do beyond launching an app. On Sequoia, if I typed “Numbers” into Spotlight, I’d get the option to open the app after typing its full name followed by suggestions for websites or web searches, which aren’t very useful in this context, followed by actual Numbers spreadsheets I’d opened recently.

I use Numbers often enough that Tahoe knows to put it at the top of the list as soon as I type an “N”.

In contrast, I use Numbers frequently enough that Tahoe has learned that when I type “N,” I probably want Numbers, so it’s the first choice. That sort of adaptive learning of which results to prioritize is found throughout Spotlight. The other options Spotlight displays aren’t broken into sections anymore. Instead, there’s a row of filters below the Spotlight search box that allow you to limit your search to certain contexts like menu items for the app you’re currently using, your clipboard, and other apps that may be relevant.

Selecting the Numbers filter or hitting Tab narrows your Spotlight search to just Numbers documents.

If the first choice is what you want, which it is for me when I simply type “N,” you can also hit the Tab key and limit the suggestions below the Spotlight search field to Numbers and CSV files. Begin typing again and, in my Numbers example, Spotlight will start searching this newly filtered list of relevant documents based on their metadata and content. It’s a powerful way to find files from outside the Finder that I absolutely love.

Just as cool, though, is that if I type the first few letters like “Num” because I want to find the audiobook Number Go Up by Zeke Faux and not the app Numbers, I can use the right arrow key to move into the row of filters under the Spotlight search field until I reach the Books app, which will find it in my Apple Books library. Then, after arrowing down to the first choice, I hit Return, Books opens, and the audio starts.

There is a bunch of newly-searchable content in Tahoe’s version of Spotlight too, including:

the windows and tabs you have open in apps,

files from third-party cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox,

podcasts,

popular websites like YouTube, Amazon, and IMDb that are accessed by typing their names followed by a Tab, and

text in screenshots.

Spotlight can search third-party cloud file providers like Dropbox and Google Drive, podcasts, open windows and tabs, and more.

Tabbing and arrowing through results is a good example of the second axis along which Spotlight has made major improvements, reducing friction and allowing anyone who prefers to use a keyboard more than a pointing device to move quickly. Another great example of Spotlight’s new keyboard-centric workflow is what Apple calls quick keys. These are essentially aliases that allow you to tie apps, actions, and other items indexed by Spotlight to key combinations. I’m calling them aliases because quick keys are a little different from traditional keyboard shortcuts in that they don’t require a modifier key.

An example of a quick key combination I’ve assigned to a shortcut.

For example, I have a shortcut called ‘Fetch Podcast Details’ that pulls URLs and other metadata for me after we publish a podcast episode, saving it to PastePal for use later in the week. Shortcuts can now be launched from Spotlight the same way you would launch an app. For this particular shortcut, though, I assigned the quick key “fp” for “Fetch Podcast.” Now, whenever I want to run the shortcut, I type “fp” and hit Return to run the shortcut. That’s it.

macOS Tahoe uses quick key shortcuts to access actions to access what are effectively one action shortcuts and slash “/” commands to filter files by type.

Okay, let’s get back to what else is new in Spotlight. Many of our readers are probably aware of App Intents. It’s the Apple framework that powers everything from Shortcuts to widgets, Live Activities, and a lot more. It’s also what will eventually power the “Smarter Siri” outlined at WWDC 2024. With Tahoe, Spotlight has gained an entire Actions tab. These tabs can be found by activating Spotlight and then either using the arrow keys to reveal the new categories to the right of the search field, moving your pointer, or using the keyboard shortcuts ⌘ + 1 through ⌘ + 4. Again, Apple has gone all out on the keyboard navigation, which takes Spotlight from simply powerful to fast, too.

The Actions tab with suggestions followed by a list organized by app.

When you open the Actions section, you’ll see a list of suggested actions that will evolve over time based on your use. Suggested actions are followed by an alphabetical list of individual actions grouped by app. If you’ve ever used an App Shortcut on your iPhone or iPad, that’s essentially what these actions are: one-off actions available from macOS system apps and third-party apps. Like apps and shortcuts, they can be assigned quick keys to speed up the process of activating them.

Spotlight lets you browse apps in a grid or list view and filter by type.

I’ve already covered how working with apps has changed from prior versions of Spotlight, but one other small change that the Applications and Files sections have in common is an option to toggle between a default grid and list view of results. In fact, when it comes to apps, Launchpad has been removed from Tahoe. Activate Spotlight’s apps section, and you’ll be presented with a grid of icons that’s a lot like what Launchpad was before, except that it scrolls vertically and can be filtered by app category. Another change is that, by default, the app section includes your iPhone apps, which can be opened on your Mac using iPhone Mirroring if your iPhone is nearby.

Spotlight’s Files tab.

As for files, the experience of searching has improved here too. Looking at my suggestions, they’re all on point, offering a spreadsheet, a Logic project, and some images edited in Pixelmator Pro, all of which I worked on recently. Suggestions are followed by Recents, which include the other files I used today and yesterday.

Filtering files by Preview.

Below the Spotlight search field, apps are suggested as filters for files. For example, selecting Preview will limit files to recent images, while picking Logic Pro will show me a reverse chronological list of my Logic project files. Of course, you can use the search field to narrow results, too.

Historically, I’ve searched for files using the Finder or an app like Forklift, but Spotlight has really grown on me as an alternative way to find files. Its Recents list works better than the Recents folder in the Finder, and the emphasis on recently used files in search results means I can find files from ongoing projects faster, without clicking around in Finder columns to sort files by their modified or added dates. I don’t expect I’ll abandon the Finder for accessing files by any means, but I do love the quick access that Spotlight now affords me.

My clipboard is packed with Markdown links to images for this review.

The final section of Spotlight is a clipboard history that aggregates items you’ve copied over the last eight hours. Other apps offer longer windows, but the reality is that, for me at least, I rarely search back further than that, which has been borne out in practice as I’ve used Spotlight this summer. However, Spotlight’s clipboard history doesn’t meet all of my needs. I supplement it with PastePal, which integrates with Shortcuts, allows me to save bits of text and files in categories, and lets me save sequences of clipboard items for quickly pasting into forms and spreadsheets.

You can also access prior Spotlight searches by arrowing up through them in reverse chronological order, and you can use slash commands to narrow searches. For example, when you open the Files tab and start a search with “/pdf”, your search will be limited to PDF documents. This trick works with screenshots, the clipboard, cloud file providers such as Dropbox and Google Drive, GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, QuickTime videos, folders, and documents, too.

Spotlight’s settings got an overhaul, too.

It’s also worth touching on Spotlight’s new settings. In Sequoia, you could exclude categories of items, such as apps, contacts, and various file types, from Spotlight’s index. Tahoe’s Spotlight takes a hybrid approach, giving you the ability to exclude the files generated by individual apps as well as broad system-level categories, including apps, documents, folders, iPhone apps, and menu items. Other new settings include the ability to exclude your clipboard history as well as Internet and services content from results, buttons to clear your search history and reset quick keys, and a toggle to turn off private query sharing with Apple.

It’s rare that a new macOS feature changes a fundamental workflow I’ve relied on for an extended period of time, but Spotlight has done that. I’ve used third-party app launchers from the time I got my first Mac. Until Tahoe, Spotlight just didn’t meet my needs. I’ve historically used launchers first and foremost to open apps, but there have always been other productivity features they offered that kept me from embracing Spotlight.

It’s rare that a new macOS feature changes a fundamental workflow I’ve relied on for an extended period of time, but Spotlight has done that.

That’s changed with Tahoe. A big part of it is the inclusion of actions, but the biggest change has been the keyboard-driven approach Apple has taken and the adaptive results. It allows me to move quickly to find relevant information without hunting around in an app. I’ve also found that Spotlight is fast. I’ve tested Tahoe on my M1 Max Mac Studio, and over the course of the betas, Apple has continuously tuned Spotlight to a point where it’s fast and responsive. You will occasionally catch it in the midst of indexing, especially after an OS update, which can affect performance, but I haven’t found that indexing gets in my way as a practical matter.

The bottom line is that Spotlight’s update is fantastic and well worth your time to try.

Live Translation

Apple Intelligence powers an impressive new Live Translation feature found in Messages, Phone, and FaceTime. We’ll have more to say about Live Translation in a separate story, but I wanted to provide a brief overview of how it works and where you can find it.

In Messages, the first time a new language is detected, you’ll get a prompt asking whether you want to translate the message you received. If you indicate you want the message translated, macOS Tahoe will download the relevant language files, which takes a little while depending on your Internet connection. However, the next message you receive will be translated immediately, as will messages you send back.

Talking to myself in Portuguese.

I tested Messages in Portuguese with the help of Google Translate and was impressed with the results. This isn’t a feature I expect to use often, but I appreciate that it’s available and works so well.

Likewise, FaceTime and Phone calls can be translated in real time. In the Phone app, you’ll hear the caller’s speech translated in real time into your language, and if you’re on speakerphone, you’ll see their words on screen in your language, too. The FaceTime experience is similar, with real-time captions appearing on screen in your language as someone speaks to you.

I’m all for anything that helps bring down communication barriers between people. I think my use cases for this feature will be limited, but having played around with it a bit, I’d be perfectly comfortable using it if the need arises in the future.

Apple Intelligence

Genmoji.

Before moving on to discuss individual apps, I want to cover the highlights of Apple Intelligence. As it was with Sequoia, Apple Intelligence is sprinkled throughout macOS Tahoe. I’ve already mentioned Apple Intelligence in the context of Live Translation and will touch on it where it’s incorporated in other system apps, but there are a couple of other big-ticket Apple Intelligence features worth calling out here because they’re available in more than one place in Tahoe.

First off is Genmoji. Most readers probably know I’m not a fan of generative image creation. However, probably the least offensive use I’ve seen for it is the new ability to take multiple Apple-designed emoji and combine them to create something new that, more often than not, sort of looks as if it were designed by Apple, or at least someone imitating an Apple designer. That shouldn’t be surprising given that the source material is a set of emoji designed by Apple.

Poor duck.

However, unusual combinations of disparate emoji can sometimes lead to unexpected and strange results. Also, some combinations fail occasionally, but it’s not at all clear to me whether that’s because of bugs, system limits, or the model’s guardrails.

The ChatGPT options in Image Playground.

Image Playground has also added new style options thanks to OpenAI. If you click on the ChatGPT style option, you’ll find sub-options for:

Any Style

Oil Painting

Watercolor

Vector

Anime

Print

When you pick one of the ChatGPT options, you’ll be asked for permission to send the components of the image you’ve requested to ChatGPT. The generation process for these takes considerably longer than any of the locally generated images that use Apple’s models, which isn’t surprising. You also won’t get the continuously updating carousel of images to pick from that Apple’s models offer, undoubtedly due to the time it takes to generate each image.

As with any generative image tool, the results are often mixed, with the more stylized images evoking fewer creepy uncanny valley vibes. Here are a couple of examples of Federico as an astronaut that he said I could share:

The proportions of the Ticci-naut on the left, which was created with ‘Any Style,’ are all wrong, and the whole thing is creepy, whereas anime Ticci-naut bothers me less, probably because it’s less realistic.

I find the whole realm of image generation distasteful and never use it, but there are more options than before. Putting aside my distaste for a moment, I’d say that ChatGPT’s results are qualitatively better than the ones from Apple’s models, but still not as good as I’ve seen from other generative image tools. As for Apple’s image models, to my eye there’s no qualitative difference between the images that Image Playground produces in Sequoia and Tahoe, which is to say they’re still far behind the generative image tools available elsewhere.

Apps

There’s a lot of overlap between the system apps on the Mac and other platforms. Instead of repeating the discussion of those apps in two reviews, Federico and I have split most of them up. The exceptions are Shortcuts, Messages, Phone, and Safari, where there are some Mac-specific features I wanted to cover, too. However, for more about Clock, Music, Photos, Preview, and Reminders, be sure to check out Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 26 review.

Shortcuts

It feels good to start off with Shortcuts in a macOS review for once. I still have many unfulfilled wishes for the app, but with the troubles Apple has had with building “Smart Siri,” I figured Shortcuts might remain largely untouched this year. To the contrary, there are a couple of big new features that make the app far more useful on the Mac and bring it closer to feature parity with iOS and iPadOS.

So far, I’ve created 13 automations, most of which are shortcuts that trigger at a time of day.

The first tentpole feature is Automation, which the iPhone and iPad versions of Shortcuts have had for a long time. Automations are great on those platforms, too, but if you have an always-on desktop Mac like I do, you probably grew to resent the need to seek out third-party solutions for simple automations like running a shortcut on a schedule or when the contents of a folder changed. I know I sure did.

But fortunately, automations are finally here and better than I’d hoped. Simply being able to tie a shortcut to a schedule is fantastic. So is the ability to run a shortcut when a file is added or modified in a specified folder. So far, these are the automations I’ve used the most.

The list of automation triggers is extensive.

However, the list is much longer. You can also trigger shortcuts:

at sunrise or sunset,

daily, weekly, or monthly,

when an alarm goes off, is snoozed, or stopped,

when an email arrives from a particular sender, with certain words in the subject line, to a specified account, or to a particular recipient,

when a message arrives in Messages from a particular sender or with certain body text,

when files are moved, modified, or removed from a folder,

when the contents of a file are changed or it’s renamed,

when any or a specific drive is connected or disconnected,

when you join or disconnect from a Wi-Fi network or a connection is interrupted,

when Bluetooth devices or displays are connected or disconnected,

when Stage Manager is turned on or off,

when apps are opened or closed, and

when any of your Focus modes are turned on or off.

That’s a lot of options, which is great, and it makes me think of so many things I could do with Shortcuts on my Mac that were difficult or impossible before. For example, with a very simple shortcut, I could have my Mac shut down when a Carbon Copy Cloner backup finishes and the drive it’s using is unmounted. I could have my computer alert me to important emails or text messages by blinking my HomeKit lights, upscale video as soon as it’s saved to a folder, or open an app when another one finishes processing a file so the next step in a workflow can begin.

The other big feature, which I’ll leave for Federico to cover in depth in his review, is the addition of the ‘Use Model’ action that allows you to craft prompts for Apple’s local model, its Private Cloud Compute model, or ChatGPT. With one action, Shortcuts has opened up a world of possibilities and, in some circumstances, simpler shortcuts. That’s because natural language prompting can short-circuit what would otherwise be a complex series of ‘if’ statements designed to cover every possible contingency in a more deterministic flow.

Of course, LLMs can make mistakes, but you probably shouldn’t be relying on Shortcuts for anything with high-accuracy stakes in the first place, so for less critical tasks, it’s a great tool to have. Other Apple Intelligence actions include:

Adjust Tone of Text,

Make List from Text,

Make Table from Text,

Proofread Text,

Rewrite Text,

Summarize Text, and

Create Image, which taps into Image Playground’s image generation feature.

Messages

Messages backgrounds.

The updates to Messages are a mixed bag: some good features, some not so great. At WWDC, conversation backgrounds sounded like a good idea, but in reality, I don’t like them. They do separate conversations visually, making it easier to tell them apart, but in practice, I find all the options – which include built-in backgrounds, your own photos, and images generated by Image Playground – distracting. Plus, they take a beat to load when you switch conversations, which looks bad, so I won’t be using them going forward.

On the positive side of things, I didn’t know how much I wanted typing indicators in group threads until I had them. It’s simply nice to see who’s responding when multiple people are active on a thread at once. As you’d expect, the feature works by showing the typist’s profile picture next to the typing indicator.

If Messages detects what it thinks is spam, it will put it in a special list for you to review later.

The app now handles messages from unknown senders and spam better, too. Both are filtered locally on your Mac and sent to designated lists instead of your main conversation view. When a new unknown message or potential spam is detected, it’s shuffled off to its list, and a new message indicator appears next to the filter button at the top of the Messages sidebar. That way, you can check the messages when you have time and either leave them where they are, delete them, move them to your known senders, or mark them as not spam. In Sequoia, you could change views to filter out unknown messages, but spam detection is new, and both are easier to access now that there’s a dedicated filter button in the sidebar.

Tahoe’s new conversation Info panel.

The other big change is the redesign of the conversation Info panel. In Sequoia, it was a popup window that dropped down from an info button in Messages’ toolbar. The info button has been replaced with the profile picture of the person or group with whom you’re messaging, which is an improvement in and of itself that makes it less likely that you’ll respond in the wrong thread.

When the profile photo for a thread is clicked, it opens a separate sidebar on the right side of the window. A lot of what you’ll find in the sidebar was already available in the old design, but I’ve found the new version to be more performant, better organized, and easier to navigate. Some conversation settings like hiding alerts and leaving a conversation have been moved to the new sidebar, too. Plus, you’ll find an option to turn on automatic translation for any multilingual conversations. The effect makes conversations feel more anchored and substantial. The dedicated sidebar is easier to use as a resource for past shared items and communication, too, which is excellent.

Messages has also added polls to take quick votes among your friends and family, whether it’s what color of shoes to buy, where to eat, or anything else where you’re looking for someone’s opinion. Finally, search has been improved to support natural language. I’ve never found Messages’ search to be especially good for long-running conversations, and this is an improvement, but not a silver bullet. I’d love to see Apple make it easier for third-party developers to access Messages’ database through an API to create search utilities, but unless and until that happens, I’ll take Tahoe’s incremental improvement.

Games

Devon is a Jeopardy champ!

The Games app is a brand new system app on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad that suffers from expectations that were set based on pre-WWDC rumors. People were quick to assume that Games would be a new games-only storefront, leaving just apps in the existing App Store. As it turns out, that’s not what Games is at all; it’s more ambitious than that. For some, that may be a disappointment, and it’s far from guaranteed that Games will catch on, but I like what Apple is attempting to do.

Games is designed to serve both players and developers. For players, the app is a hub for gaming that can be controlled the same way any other app can be or with a controller. At the top of the app’s window, you’ll see large banners promoting games. Some of the banners are for games that aren’t in your library, and although it doesn’t replace the App Store, you can access these games directly from the Games app without opening the App Store to download or purchase them. Other banners advertise game challenges, a feature I’ll cover in a moment. Still others show you game achievements earned by people in your Friends list.

Achievements aren’t new, but the banners you see at the top of the Games app showing them off are another pillar of the app. Games has consolidated Game Center features in one place, where previously they could only be accessed within games that support Game Center or from Settings. Those existing access points for Game Center still exist, but now, you can manage things like your profile, friends, and sharing features from your profile picture in the Games app, too.

Games promotes challenges, which can also be set up in the Friends tab.

Challenges are brand new to Games and add a social component to what are often single-player experiences. A challenge can be created from inside a game’s page, which shows you who is playing it, or from Games’ Friends tab. A good example is the Apple News app; it offers six games you can set up as challenges. You simply pick a game, add one or more friends, and set a challenge such as the high score during a given week. What’s smart about the feature is that it’s built on top of Game Center’s existing Leaderboards feature, which makes adding challenges straightforward for game developers who already use Leaderboards. Your invitees receive a challenge request with details about the challenge and, using deep links, are taken directly to the relevant screen in the game with a ‘Play’ button.

Games is an easy way to drop back into a recent game and see what friends are playing.

Rounding out the Home tab in Games is a section encouraging you to continue playing recent games, graphics showing what your friends are playing, lists and editorial content (such as top Apple Arcade games), buttons to browse by genre, a ‘New Games We Love’ section, themed collections, friend suggestions, and top free and paid game charts. The look and feel of Games’ Home tab is very reminiscent of the App Store, which should make it feel familiar to players. Aside from its narrower content focus, though, what stands out about Games’ design is that it feels roomier than the App Store. That’s a good thing because it creates space to showcase games and emphasize the social aspects of Game Center, which I like.

The Friends tab.

Games has a few other tabs, too. There’s the Friends tab that I already mentioned. In addition to letting you set up challenges, the Friends tab shows your active challenges, suggests games with challenges, and lists of your friends and what they are playing. There’s also a dedicated tab for browsing Apple Arcade games and a search tab that includes buttons to view top charts, Arcade games, and a variety of game genres.

The Games Library tab.

Finally, Games includes a Library tab that lists every game you’ve ever downloaded from the App Store, along with buttons that lead to the Apple Arcade games you’ve downloaded and your Game Center achievements. On the Mac, your library includes games from outside the Mac App Store, too, encompassing sources like Steam. Although the Library is just a list of games, it’s far easier to navigate than the App Store simply because it’s composed of only games. Plus, you can sort all of your games chronologically or by name and filter by whether the game has controller support, is installed, or is part of Apple Arcade.

I have some rare gems in my Games library, many of which are sadly no longer available.

One filter I’d love to see added is a way to exclude games that are not installed and no longer available on the App Store. Although it’s fun to take a trip down memory lane, a lot of the games I downloaded years ago are sadly no longer accessible. It’s a reminder of the lack of game preservation on Apple platforms, but being able to filter out those dead-end games would make finding and playing the oldest games in my collection that are still playable easier.

An notification reminds players how to access Game Overlay.

Another feature of the Games app is the Games Overlay, which you can summon with an Xbox controller’s Xbox button, the PS button on a Sony DualSense controller, or ⌘ + Esc if you’re using a keyboard. When you start a game, you’ll see a notification reminding you of the keyboard combination that activates the Games Overlay, too.

The Games Overlay.

When activated, Games Overlay shows you the game you’re playing and any achievements that you’ve completed. There’s also a button that opens the Games app, a button for voice or text chatting with friends, and some basic settings like volume, display brightness, a Focus mode toggle, access to controller settings if you’re using one, and a Now Playing widget. The Games Overlay is also where you access Low Power Mode on Mac laptops to help preserve battery life on the go. All of these features are useful, but I’d also like to see some gamer-y stats like frame rates available, too.

On a related note that isn’t strictly a Games issue, I’d like to see Apple address how slowly large apps and games download from the Mac App Store. I’m on a 2,000 Mbps fiber connection, and Prince of Persia: Lost Crown is 27.45 GB. Under ideal conditions, that should take about two minutes to download. Now, I understand that conditions are never ideal with it comes to Internet traffic, but the game took seven minutes to download to my computer, which is 3.5 × longer than the ideal.

I had an even worse experience downloading Cyberpunk 2077 earlier this summer. It’s 158.66 GB and took well over 30 minutes to download. Neither of these were isolated issues, either. Cyberpunk was painfully slow to download on multiple Macs, including an M4 Max MacBook Pro, as were other games I’ve downloaded before. Download speeds have plagued consoles in the past, too, but the App Store’s speeds are especially bad, creating enough friction to make downloading a new game to play on the platform anything but spontaneous.

For developers, the Games app should be an attractive option. There’s more space for Apple to promote apps, developers’ in-game events have more prominent placement in an app that’s designed to be a player destination, and features like challenges could make their games more engaging for players. That said, we’re approaching two decades of iPhone gaming and nearly as long for the iPad and Mac App Stores. Habits have been formed, and favorite games have been picked, so I expect it will be hard to make Games a go-to place for many people.

Still, I’m a fan of Games. It makes it easier to browse my library, find new things to try, and connect with friends, which isn’t something I did much with Game Center. It’s a good app, but the question remains, “If you build it, will they come?”

Maps

Visited Places.

One of the first things I did when we moved to North Carolina was create a series of Maps Guides for nearby towns. I added places we visited and liked, as well as places we hadn’t been to yet that looked interesting. It’s been an excellent way to explore our new home and pick old favorites when we are at a loss for what to do.

If you choose to allow Maps to detect your location, it can decipher locations like parks, restaurants, and shops you visit, adding them to a library of the places you go.

With iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 26, Maps has added a great new beta feature called Visited Places. If you choose to allow Maps to detect your location, it can decipher locations like parks, restaurants, and shops you visit, adding them to a library of the places you go. When Visited Places is unsure about a place, it will sometimes ask you if you went there on a particular date, but for the most part, the process is completely automatic.

Since I returned from WWDC, my Visited Places library has grown to over 90 locations, although my Mac only lists 75 for some reason. It’s an eclectic mix of places that includes ordinary stops at our local pharmacy and grocery store, restaurants and shops in Charlotte and the surrounding towns, and parks, landmarks, and other places visited on trips to Texas and the beach.

Visited Places are automatically categorized.

You can scroll through the entire list if you’d like, but Maps offers automatic categories to filter places by like Dining, Shopping, Transport, Nature, Leisure, Services, and Health. You can browse by city and date, too. At the bottom of the Visited Places section is an option to save places for three months, one year, or forever. There’s also an option to clear your history and start over, as well as a search bar.

Here are the details about a retro videogame shop I recently visited where you can see I added it to my Video Game and Winston-Salem guides after a recent trip.

Visited Places are like other locations in Apple Maps and work a little like existing guides. You can always delete individual locations you don’t want to keep, add notes, rate locations, and share them. Sharing is based on a new short URL, too, banishing those incredibly long, ugly Maps URLs for good. And, like any location in Maps, tapping on one opens a card with lots of details and images of it.

I’ve chosen to keep my Visited Places forever and haven’t edited them much. I find it fun to swipe back through the days in the same way I enjoy revisiting my Photo Library. Plus, it’s made building my guides to towns around Charlotte easier because when we go out exploring, I can simply tap on the places I enjoyed and use the ‘More’ menu to add them to an existing collection or start a new one.

At the bottom of Visited Places, you can search by date and manage how long you keep places.

In practice, I’ve found that Visited Places does a good job of figuring out where I’ve been, but it sometimes misses a location. We recently spent a weekend in Asheville, where it detected all but one of the places we stopped for meals, but few of the shops; perhaps we didn’t linger in the shops long enough. On the way home, we stopped in a couple more towns, visiting a farmers market and stopping for lunch, neither of which were detected. The feature is still listed as a beta, so some inconsistencies aren’t surprising, and while I’d like to see the feature improve with time, it’s already good enough to be valuable. I highly recommend giving it a try.

There are a couple of other Maps features worth mentioning that I haven’t used because I don’t have a commute. The first is that the app can now detect your preferred driving routes to places like your home and work, which it will preview for you so you can see what your commute time will be. There are also new kinds of incident reports you can send while driving like road closures, traffic, and construction.

Journal

For dedicated journalers, I’m sure there are plenty of better solutions out there, but as someone who likes the idea of journaling more than I actually do it, I love Journal. The app debuted on the iPhone, which struck me as odd at first because I’m someone for whom writing means having a physical keyboard. Yet at the same time, the iPhone is what’s always with you, and for most people, it’s likely a much bigger part of your everyday life than an iPad or Mac is. That drove the app to emphasize photos, media, location tracking, and other low-friction ways to fill out a journal without feeling like you have to write a book-length entry. Those features, along with the built-in prompting system, make Journal a great first step for anyone interested in journaling.

I’m still not a regular journaler, but I do collect photos, locations, and random thoughts in Journal (and, before that, Day One) from time to time. It’s funny because I remember finding an entry in Day One about launching an app in 2015, which ended up being almost verbatim something I wrote years later on MacStories. I guess certain stories just sit with you, ready to be told whenever the time is right.

Looks like I had an exciting day in October 2023.

With macOS Tahoe and iPadOS 26, maintaining a journaling practice is easier than ever. That’s because iPad and Mac versions of the app have joined the iOS app, and all of them sync via iCloud. As a result, many MacStories readers undoubtedly have at least one – and, in a lot of cases, three – gadgets within reach to jot something down.

You won’t find any meaningful differences between the core features of the Mac and iPad versions of Journal and the iOS version, which is good. Journal will be immediately familiar, allowing you to write and add photos, video, audio, drawings, and locations. The app even works with your Mac’s built-in camera or an external camera you’ve connected to it, and it now allows you to create multiple journals for different aspects of your life. Other updates to Journal across all platforms include a Map view that looks just like the Maps app, and more flexible options for placing images and other journal elements. On the iPad, the Apple Pencil is supported and includes a reed pen for calligraphy, and journaling suggestions can be synced from your iPhone.

The Mac version of Journal has one of the better implementations of Liquid Glass that I’ve seen, too. If you’re scrolling through journal entries, you’ll notice that the ‘+’ button and search field are transparent, blending into the background as you scroll, which is a nice effect in this context where you’re looking back through entries. However, if you open a new journal entry or edit an existing entry, the buttons in the Mac’s toolbar are semitransparent, making them more prominent, which makes sense when you’re working with text and editing it. It’s the sort of implementation that makes me optimistic that rough edges in other places will get smoothed out.

Notes

Importing a Markdown file.

There are only a couple of changes to Notes this year. The first is the ability to import and export Markdown-formatted text. From the File menu, you can select ‘Import Markdown…,’ which will let you navigate to a .md file on your Mac and select it. Imported Markdown files are meant to create notes in an ‘Imported Notes’ folder. However, if you import a second Markdown file, it will be dropped into ‘Imported Notes 1’ instead. Repeat the process, and you’ll end up with an ‘Imported Notes 2’ folder, too, which isn’t great.

This feature is available on iOS and iPadOS 26, too, but it works differently there. On both platforms, you can share a Markdown file to Notes by opening the Files app and using the share sheet.

A table imported from a Markdown file.

Apart from the issue with folders, Markdown imports work well. The feature even includes support for Markdown tables, which I didn’t expect. Photos work a little differently. For images hosted in the cloud, such as the ones in this review, the app converts them into links that lead to the images, but it doesn’t display the images themselves. By and large, though, the import process works well and doesn’t require any substantial adjustments.

Similarly, Notes can export as Markdown for the first time on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. In addition to Markdown’s core syntax, Notes supports extensions like highlighting and can export tables just as well as it can import them. Images are handled, too, exporting your text file alongside a folder labeled ‘Attachments,’ which contains each image, with proper Markdown syntax in the text file referencing each image by file name.

Voicemails and audio recordings from Phone and FaceTime calls can now be saved in Notes, preserving their transcriptions. You can add text to the imported notes, and when selected, the audio file will be displayed in the right sidebar, where it can be played as the transcript is displayed.

Phone and FaceTime

Calling a local restaurant using a link in Safari.

Many of my favorite Mac features are tied to Continuity in some way. I regularly copy text between my iPhone and Mac, AirDrop screenshots and other files, check package deliveries in iPhone apps that aren’t available on the Mac with iPhone Mirroring, and more. I’m a big fan of Universal Control, which I use to control multiple Macs or a Mac and iPad frequently, too.

One Continuity feature that I didn’t use as much in macOS Sequoia and earlier versions, though, is the ability to initiate calls from the Mac. I’ve never been a big Phone user, and that’s not likely to change, but the addition of a Phone app that integrates existing and new features – Continuity and otherwise – into macOS has made calling from a Mac a much better experience.

Screening a caller.

By far my favorite feature is Call Screening. When a call comes in from an unknown number, your iPhone picks it up and asks who’s calling. On the Mac, the process plays out in a notification in the top-right corner of your display. At any time, you can pick up the call and jump in to talk to the person, but I usually leave it alone given the number of spam calls I get each week. Those numbers rarely respond to the screening message, minimizing the interruption in my day.

When you’re put on hold, you have the option to hang up and be rung back when someone picks up.

Hold Assist works in the opposite direction. If you make a call and are put on hold, you can leave the call to iOS, which will ring you back when the hold is removed. As with Call Screening, the process plays out thanks to Continuity in a notification window on your Mac.

As I mentioned in the Apple Intelligence section, Phone also incorporates real-time translation of one-to-one calls for U.S. and UK English, French, German, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish on Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhones, iPads, and Macs. You can see a written transcript of your conversation as it is happening if you use the Phone app’s speakerphone option, too.

I’ll leave the remainder of the Phone app, including its significant redesign, to Federico. As much as I appreciate the Phone app’s new screening and hold features, my relationship with it isn’t tapping on beautiful profile pictures of friends and family; it’s deleting hundreds of spam calls like the ones above. The new Phone features make dealing with unwanted calls and hold times easier, which I appreciate, but using a phone app to call someone in 2025 increasingly feels like writing a paper check to pay your bills and licking stamps to send them in the mail.

The design contrast between Phone and FaceTime on macOS Tahoe is interesting. Phone’s toolbar is translucent, while the buttons to control Center Stage, portrait mode, and backgrounds in FaceTime pick up the same transparency as apps like Music. In lieu of a list of recent calls in the left sidebar, the FaceTime update displays tiles for each call. If you come across a video message someone left for you, it will autoplay as you scroll past, too. Like the Phone app, transcripts of calls can be sent to Notes, and conversations can be transcribed with Live Translation.

Podcasts

Podcasts’ Liquid Glass redesign on the Mac.

Last year, I switched to Apple Podcasts during the summer beta season and never left. There’s a lot in the app that I don’t use, like most of the Home tab and the entire New tab, but my podcast listening is very ad hoc these days. I follow a variety of shows, but I only have a few where I listen to every episode. So typically, I head to the Latest tab and start a recent episode, or save episodes I know I won’t get to right away, moving to the Saved tab when I don’t see anything I want to listen to in Latest. It’s such a simple system, it’s hardly a system at all, but it makes podcast listening feel like less of a chore and more spontaneous.

This year, Apple Podcasts received several updates on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS 26, including the full transparent Liquid Glass treatment on every platform. I like the look, but as with Music, I don’t like that the playback controls have been moved to the bottom of the window on the Mac. That said, I never listen to podcasts on my Mac, so it doesn’t bother me as much as the change in Music does.

New Enhance Dialogue (left) and more granular speed controls (right).

On iOS and iPadOS 26 (but oddly not the Mac), Apple has also added an Enhance Dialogue feature that boosts vocal ranges to make them easier to hear. Third-party podcast players have had this sort of vocal EQ feature for years, and I’d say that Apple’s implementation works equally well. I can tell the difference when I enable Enhance Dialogue, but it’s not so dramatic that it sounds off. The one slightly odd thing about the feature is that its toggle is in the playback speed menu on the playback screen, which wasn’t the first place I looked for it. Also, the toggle turns Enhance Dialogue on app-wide. You can’t turn it on selectively by show.

Speaking of the playback speed controls, Podcasts now offers more fine-grained control on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The playback speed button opens a menu that has six default speeds from 0.8× to 2.0×, but by swiping across the defaults, you can change the speed from 0.5× to 3.0× in increments of 0.1. I generally listen to shows at 1.0× but appreciate that it’s now possible to dial in a comfortable speed more precisely.

Safari

Safari’s PiP has a new Liquid Glass design and skip forward and back buttons.

Besides the Liquid Glass changes to Safari that I’ve already covered, the app mostly had the year off as far as Tahoe is concerned – although be sure to read Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 26 review for details on new security and privacy features added across all platforms.

Still, there’s one Mac-centric feature that I wanted to shout out that I love: the improvements to Picture-in-Picture. You know how you had to right-click twice to get the option to open a YouTube video in PiP? That’s still an option, but now, you can also access the feature by simply clicking on the Page Menu, which is the little icon on the far left of the address bar. Better yet, the PiP viewer finally has buttons to skip ahead and back by 10 seconds. The window also has a progress bar along the bottom that looks like it could be used as a scrub bar to move around inside a video, but it can’t, which is a shame. Apple says that you can now skip ads where it’s supported in PiP, which isn’t something I’ve come across yet.

Everything Else

Terminal

Terminal’s grass theme generating a transcript with Yap.

Terminal has been updated in Tahoe with a new settings window, themes to customize the experience, 24-bit color support, and support for Powerline glyphs for creating status bars and prompts. I like the app’s extensive customization options a lot. However, Terminal seems like a place where Apple could take a page out of the book of apps like Warp and integrate some helpful Apple Intelligence features to make the app easier for inexperienced command line users to take advantage of.

Passwords

With Tahoe, Passwords adds a password history, allowing you to see the changes you’ve made over time. I’ve already found this useful when something goes wrong with a password update, allowing me to try a previous password. It’s a small touch, but it adds the kind of flexibility that helps a lot when you run into a site with a login process that fails.

Accessibility

Magnifier. Source: Apple

Jonathan Reed covered macOS accessibility features on MacStories for Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Among the features coming to the Mac are Magnifier, Braille Access, Accessibility Reader, Accessibility Nutrition Labels, and Vehicle Motion Cues. For more information on each, be sure to check out Jonathan’s comprehensive story.

Parental Controls

macOS Tahoe provides new tools for parents through parental controls, too. Communications Limits allows parents to approve messages sent from new phone numbers to their kids, a feature that extends to third-party chat and social apps that adopt Apple’s framework. Requests are delivered to parents in Messages, where they can be approved with a tap.

Communications Safety has expanded the places where nudity is detected to live FaceTime calls and Shared Albums in Photos, blurring the images. Kids can also share their age ranges with third-party apps to access age-appropriate features if allowed by a parent, enhancing privacy by sharing a range instead of a child’s precise age.

Finally, App Store product pages have been updated with information about whether the app features user-generated content, messaging, advertising, or content controls. The first apps I checked on to see what these changes mean were X: The Everything App and Grok. While X is rated 16+ and lists user-generated content, Grok is still 13+, despite the app’s inclusion of an AI character that is designed for sexually suggestive interactions. So while these new parental controls are a positive addition to Tahoe, they are not foolproof. They rely on developers like xAI correctly self-reporting the content in their apps and Apple policing the App Store.

Conclusion

The Mac is still a truck.

If there’s an elephant in the room with this review, it’s the vocal group of very online Mac users who decided early in the beta period that macOS Tahoe is garbage. Try as I may to put myself in their shoes, I just don’t get it. Liquid Glass isn’t perfect, but it’s not the visual and legibility disaster some have made it out to be. Nor have I run into show-stopping bugs or an unusual number of smaller glitches. I’ve spent over three months moving between Tahoe and Sequoia daily, and what stands out to me isn’t the differences between the two versions of the operating system; it’s their similarities.

I’ve spent over three months moving between Tahoe and Sequoia daily, and what stands out to me isn’t the differences between the two versions of the operating system; it’s their similarities.

That’s not to say there aren’t meaningful new features and design differences between Sequoia and Tahoe. Of course there are. But they’re neither drastic nor bad for that matter.

Instead, what I see in macOS Tahoe is a careful balance that is successful more often than not. I’ve chronicled where I think Tahoe’s design and feature set fall short, but when you look at it in its totality, this is an excellent update, and one that Apple has been inching towards since macOS Catalina.

macOS used to be an outlier in Apple’s product lineup in terms of both design and features. That’s largely changed – and to the Mac’s benefit. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that since Apple aligned macOS more closely with iOS and iPadOS and adopted Apple silicon, the Mac’s sales are up significantly over the past two decades.

Nor do I think that this transition has been at the expense of the ever-shifting definition of what it means to be a “pro” user. I don’t use Xcode every day, but I do plenty of what I consider to be “pro” video and audio work, automate tasks with scripts, and run a business from my Mac. And in my experience, Tahoe has made my work life easier, not harder, with features like the improvements to Spotlight, Shortcuts automations, and tighter integration with the iPhone.

I opened this review talking about balance, which is exceedingly hard to achieve in software design, especially with something like macOS, where you’re designing for everyone from grade school kids using their first computers to seasoned developers who have decades of experience with the Mac’s foundational systems. I think Apple has achieved that with all of the caveats that come with any software release.

Liquid Glass on the Mac is not the visual affront that some have made it out to be. I think it gets in the way in certain apps, but by and large, it strikes a more measured, sensible balance in the Mac’s system apps. As a result, it’s never struck me as a distraction or an impediment.

And while the controversy and hot takes swirl around Liquid Glass, nobody should lose sight of updates to features like Spotlight, the menu bar, and Shortcuts. Spotlight has taken a quantum leap forward in productivity this year, with a deep set of keyboard-driven features that will speed up your day-to-day work immediately, and the menu bar has never been so customizable, which can really be said for the Mac in general. Plus, for all of its continued shortcomings, automations take Shortcuts further than just about any other single update could have.

Last year, I struggled with Sequoia. A lot of that release was pinned on Apple Intelligence features that I didn’t find very useful. This year’s Apple Intelligence features are more thoughtful and meaningful, from Live Translation in Messages, Phone, and FaceTime to access to Apple’s LLMs via Shortcuts. It’s a shift in focus that makes Tahoe more useful instead of just different.

At the end of the day, I’m excited to be writing this last paragraph, not just because I’m glad to complete this review (which I am), but because the first thing I’m going to do now is install Tahoe on the Macs I’ve been using as Sequoia reference machines. Now, I can finally install Tahoe everywhere and get away from my desk. I can’t think of a better endorsement of an OS update than that. I highly recommend giving Tahoe a try and judging the changes for yourself.