Jason Snell: macOS 26 Tahoe Review: Power Under Glass

I’ll cut to the chase: If you’re worried about upgrading to macOS 26 Tahoe because of Apple’s “liquid glass” design, don’t be—it’s mostly a minor reskinning that doesn’t really change how the Mac works, and after a few weeks, you mostly won’t notice it.

This is where I am as well with the macOS update. It's been interesting this summer as I've used Tahoe on my personal Mac since the moment Apple made it available to developers, and Sequoia on my work Mac, which is not allowed to run the betas (reasonably so). In practical terms, this has been a three-month A-B test where I've gotten to use both operating systems in every facet of my work, from casual computing to intense workflows. And when noon Central rolled around today and Apple released Tahoe to everybody, I immediately went to install it on my work Mac.

Yes, there are absolutely parts of Tahoe that look pretty rough – I'm looking at you, Apple Music, and Safari in particular. But there are also large swaths of it that look really nice to me. Add on to this the numerous functional improvements that Apple added to macOS this year, all of which Jason lays out very nicely in his review, and this is a no-brainer update for me.

Also, I've heard several people talk about Tahoe as if it's absolutely not ready to ship to consumers. This is not me denying their experience by any means, I'm sure there are bugs that are really making their lives annoying right now, but personally this has been unquestionably the smoothest Mac beta period I've ever experienced in my 30 years following the company.

Like I said, I installed this on my production Mac three months ago, and I've recorded every podcast from it, made every video on it, written every blog post on it, held hundreds of video calls on it, produced over a dozen podcast episodes on it, and I have genuinely experienced zero issues with apps working as I expected them to or crashes at any point. Obviously, this isn't everybody's experience, but it's been fascinating having that experience and then signing on to social media and seeing other people seemingly having a horrible time with it. Maybe Apple should ship my Mac to everybody. 😅