macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess(squareorbits.com) |
macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess(squareorbits.com) |
The biggest one is that moving application stacks in Mission Control no longer works. In Tahoe and prior systems, if you invoked Mission Control with the "group windows by application" option turned on, windows belonging to a given app were "stacked" under an icon for that application.
This allows the user to move ALL of an app's windows from one display to another, or from one Space (Mac virtual desktop) to another, without having to drag them one at a time.
This broke in GG. I'm sure it'll get fixed in the .1 release, but it's annoying for now.
Edit: 27.0.1 fixed that.
I always thought the eyedropper was so you could match color from an existing element. It never occurred to me to use it to use it in order to zoom in on the color wheel. Am I the only one who used it differently?
They've completely broken every experience around minimized windows:
- App Expose doesn't show minimized windows at all
- Cmd-` iterating doesn't iterate through minimized windows.
- I've had times where Cmd-`-ing to another Terminal yanked it from it's workspace onto my current one.
- It will just stop rendering the Mission Control thumbnails. 90% of the time it just shows empty workspaces
- It seems to be doing some stupid optimization where it blanks out my Firefox window until the workspace switch animation has fully finished. Likely it's part of how they finally removed the janky animations from the past 3 releases. But, COME ON Wayland can run on my 5 year old x86_64-linux laptop with perfect animations with none of this jank and compromise.
- It regularly doesn't change focus from Firefox (on my second workspace) to Firefox Nightly (on my first workspace), when swiping. Or even swiping and clicking. Only if you swipe, move the cursor and then click does focus shift to the open, top app on the workspace.
It's hot f****king garbage. Maybe this is my foot peddle but it breaks every basic way I do window management and use the OS.
Breaking minimized windows. Only Apple could manage that.
These should have been fixed as of a couple weeks now.
Anyone still seeing Tahoe? If so, please reply with the URL you are visiting.
Apple (iCloud) Data Recovery works only if you deleted files from Drive via GUI, which places them in Trash.
So you actually do have them. Whaat? Why would you need a recovery? Good question.
Now it gets really interesting: you’ve emptied the Trash and now wanna to recover some.
But they are no more. Gone. Can’t be recovered anymore.
And there is a reason of course: because fuck you, that’s why.
And it’s documented FYI, so it’s a feature.
Checkmate.
For a cry, ask it how to change the keyboard shortcut for activating Siri in Golden Gate.
This isn't new of course, it's old news. Mac OS X has been buggy since I developed for it more than two decades ago.
Form over function has been the rotten core of Apple ever since it's lost a bite!
Been on Mac since the 90s, now a very happy Linux desktop user.
Wait for the next upgrade unless you're forced to go with the first release.
Hell, frickin watchOS 27 Siri on my Ultra 3 can't set a timer because "the Clock app isn't installed on this device" ...????
and 2027 was supposed to be a "polishing" release.
When will we start seeing the benefits of all the smart AI coding shit they've supposedly rented from Anthropic? 2030?
I sure ain’t upgrading my Mac any time soon if I can help it.
It’s time for some apple internal honesty about the state of MacOS gui.
I switched from Linux to macOS but the lack of QA is going to force me back to Linux once security updates stop for Sequoia.
Same. Will sell my Air when security updates stop for Sequoia
For all that Steve was batshit he was willing to do hard things that were "bad for business." I heard so many legendary stories over the years of Steve Jobs holding up releases at the last minute because they weren't up to par. That takes guts in a corporate environment where there is so much pressure to go along and say "well, we have to ship something." No, you don't have to ship something. You can take your time to do it right and ship things that are high quality.
Apple shouldn't assume that just because they are the incumbent that they will be around forever. Today's Steve Jobs could already be alive and plotting...
It's such an obvious issue that I'm wondering whether I'm the only one experiencing it or whether Apple users just don't use Spotify or whether Spotify simply doesn't test on macOS (and as such I have no idea where even to write a ticket, the macOS Feedback app doesn't even have a category for problems in non-Apple applications).
Did they fix the bug where the toolbar of applications would either get stuck open or disappear while in full screen mode, requiring them to be moved to the desktop before returned to fullscreen?
Yep, I've run into this and issues where clicking the search results or normal sidebar items in settings do nothing. Even after killing and restarting Settings.
Golden Gate is better than Tahoe IMHO but only slightly. I hope they circle back to the myriad of bugs/UI issues they introduced.
* bluetooth keyboard suddenly very laggy * mission control spaces shortcuts
Can't believe they made this glaring oversight.
smdh
I hoped this update would've made my Mac more stable from the last release, and while maybe the performance is better, I feel like issues like this do randomly occur.
I just checked and 27.0.1 is out, so here's hoping it fixes anything....
[0] https://imgur.com/a/5i5TlzQ
EDIT: Actually, one bug that I haven't noticed on Tahoe is the weird lack of vertical padding that some System Settings screens used to have. Credit where credit's due.
New since upgrading:
- In telegram messages get stuck sending and the app has to be force quit - Discord doesn’t pick up audio device changes until the app is restarted - Soundsource has crashed a few times if I change my AirPods out. - Selecting a screenshot area is laggy when dragging the selection box
And they’ve finally fixed some annoying, long-endured audio bugs: https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2026/09/24/macos-27-fixes-mul...
Even double-clicking in Finder is broken, many times double-clicks are just ignored.
I suspect they made the animation so heavy that it reaches its deadline before it even starts, so it gets skipped.
Not sure if it's better or worse than Tahoe, where the animation (mostly) worked but app icons either popped in all at once a bit later or were rendered one by one from top-left to bottom-right.
It's such a buggy mess. When using my Mac these days I miss the polish of my Linux desktop.
Of the issues they report:
- The centering bugs seem... not very important.
- The Mac User Guide looks fine to me. Shows "for macOS 27."
- Network app?
- Why are you looking at the Mission Control app icon at 20x zoom? And in any case, doesn't it seem reasonable to simplify the traffic light design to a flat circle for an icon that will be displayed very small 99.9% of the time?
- Firefox bugs are bugs in Firefox. (I also keep experiencing the stuck menu bug, but again, Firefox bug.)
- "You can find references to NeXTSTEP, the ancestor of macOS, in its UI!" No, that's not what that means.
- "I have a folder open in the Dock. If I click on another folder, shouldn't that then open?" Yes, and it does.
- The rest, sure.
Glitches in context menus could theoretically be just Firefox bugs. Glitches in the global menu bar can't be just Firefox bugs. Those pixels don't belong to Firefox. It shouldn't be possible for an application to cause the OS to lose track of which menu the user has open in the global menu bar. Even if Firefox is buggy here (quite likely), there's clearly a deficiency in the OS itself, too.
Anywhere else on macOS, you can't do that. Even better, you can activate them with Enter.
NS hasn't had anything to do with NeXTSTEP since, well, NeXTSTEP. The author's wording makes it sound like this is some crazy remnant of forgotten 30-year-old code poking through, but it's really not. It's Swift (most likely) string concatenation being passed a view instance instead of a string by mistake.
Search this document for "Historical Note" for the canonical explanation:
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
- Centring _is_ important! How dare you!
- Same for me now. Wasn't when I used it a few days ago.
- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Very pedantic, I know. But look at some of the other icons close up, lots contain tiny details very few ever see (try the Mail app, the icon of a text file, or the loupe on the old Preview icon). That obsessive attention to detail feels like it's now in the past.
- Yeah could well be Firefox's fault. But it surfaced in Golden Gate, so I included it.
- You can trace anything NS* back to NeXTSTEP
- Not for me!
- :)
I've been a longtime Linux user, but one of the nice things about MacOS is that it comes out of the box with software for common file formats. I remember being a bit happy to skip the step where I search "best pdf editor linux".
This was true in 2022, when I started using MacOS. Around that time, people were complaining about a battery icon that was too skeumorphic or something, which is so trite in comparison to the avalanche of problems today.
But, geeze, it's rough to edit a PDF on MacOS today. The built-in PDF editor has a weird flow to add text (rather than clicking where you want to place the text, you click a button which summons a box with the text "Text" in an arbitrary position on your PDF). You have to click and drag the Text textbox to the position you want it to be in.
Every part of the UI is broken, though. You have to discover this by clicking (all icons, no text), you have to move the textbox by finding the 1px wide click-and-drag target (on a high-DPI display!), and sometimes, the text simply disappears and deletes itself, in a way no amount of cmd+Z (undo) can fix.
It's very frustrating and crazy-making, but the amount of time it took to fill out one page of a PDF precludes me from wanting to take the effort to document it in this way.
So, I very very much appreciate this author for sharing a few of the million papercuts of MacOS. It is really hard to imagine someone being proud of putting this product out.
Nor does it mean that people shouldn’t welcome improvements even if those improvements don’t bring the overall quality back to that of what it used to be.
But I do also agree with you that we shouldn’t be ignoring the fact that Apple have generally been on a downward spiral in terms of software quality for a number of years.
Golden Gate works pretty well so far for me.
It used to be very different. Apple was known for missed OS deadlines. They were sometimes compared to Blizzard back in the day; now both of them lost their reputation for polished releases. The cycle was closer to 2 years and they promised several times a tighter release schedule before ending on a yearly cycle.
I don’t think one is necessarily better than the other. Back in the day it was frequent to have a major update fail in some way and require reinstalling from scratch (though loss of data was rare). Now that releases are not that different from their predecessor, it’s much smoother. Longer cycles meant that features took much longer to get into a release. And then major fixes took more time on top of that. Now they can iterate faster, which is both a blessing and a curse.
For those who complain that we are saddle with Liquid Glass for another 2 years while they tweak it, keep in mind that it took several 2-year long release cycles to get rid of pinstripes and brushed metal.
They could've shipped a smaller list of bug fixes by a given date rather than a bigger list of bugs
I don't know if I'll ever upgrade to Golden Gate, and this blog post isn't giving me confidence.
I'd be curious to know what people think about Siri AI and whether it's finally worthwhile. I'm still running an old iPhone with no AI, so don't have much basis for comparison.
Apple 2020 Mini - Sequoia - Music/DAW
Intel 2017 MBP - Sequoia (OCLP) - Software Development
Intel 2014 MBP - Sequoia (OCLP) - Board game tutorials and videos at the gaming table (dining room)
Intel 2012 Mini - High Sierra - Very retro video gaming (doesn't access the net)
Since I can't afford to buy anything anymore, I'm keeping these the way they are for a long time. As each one dies, so does my enjoyment of computing.
Also not a bug, but a bad recession ihmo. I always used to have Finder>Show-Hidden-Files option on. Now it is always off, and one must Cmd+Shift+. to show hidden files each time one opens a directory. Why take that option away ??
If anyone has insights about what might be causing my blank "after search" window, and/or a way to make show hidden files the default please advise. Thx, NSC
I feel like the author wanted to write a post like one of those about Tahoe (menu bar, corner dragging), but the stuff they wrote about was all very "who cares"?
Golden Gate has reversed many of Tahoe's regressions and further updates will continue to do so.
> This one just irks me. Show me one oval camera lens anywhere in the world. I'm waiting.
I waited until Aug 31 before updating to MacOS 26, a new record for me. I very much hope 27 will be ready to go by Feb 1.
My recent upgrade was from Ventura to Sequoia, and I will likely move to Golden Gate at some point next summer right before Sequoia's support period expires (this happens in July or August). Over years it meant that I avoided some of the famous bugs like the discoveryd fiasco in Yosemite (I went from Maverics to El Capitan).
The one downside is that I sometimes have a to go through a huge app redesigns or big feature changes that have been accumulating over several versions. I ignore most of them and probably don't get as much value from the OS as I could have.
Golden Gate is one of the first MacOS releases with more of an enterprise focus. There's a lot under the hood that will be massive to support power users, IT admins, and the like. I'd save the complaints for massive failures in networking configuration or permissions management or anything like that, not button alignment.
Isn’t that the index being re-built? That takes a bit of time after the upgrade, but other than that it really should not be slower or use more battery. My 15 certainly does not. Maybe try to get in touch with their support?
Safari Developer Tools freezes the app.
Even though I’ve disabled the Siri AI tools, they still show up everywhere for some reason.
The main menu bar sometimes gets darker.
Apple Mail keeps formatting my emails in ways I don’t like (bullet lists, etc.).
Apple Mail Smart Mailboxes are broken if you have multiple Macs.
The list goes on…
I had this happen after toggling the menu bar background / Liquid Glass transparency settings a couple times. I think a window (from Firefox) somehow got positioned slightly behind the menu bar, which was causing it to take its color from the window instead of my desktop background when it was on top.
Find the window, then Option + maximize button should fix it.
- wastefully large "zero KB" text to signal nothing
- poor text legibility due too light of a gray color - if you don't want people to read that text, don't add it! Or hide behind some tooltip or something
- tiny font size with a lot of space wasted, that's bigger than small margins
- the useless brightness of persistent window controls, they are way too common and unimportant, especially for keyboard users that never even click on then
> I know my machine's getting old, but does it really need a second to load in the Profiles menu when I open a new Firefox window?
I don't see how age matters here for such primitive low cost operations, so no, it should be instant on a machine older than yours
> Sometimes the search bar in System Settings simply refuses to work.
This continues to be a very frequently highlighted epic fail across various Apple platforms. I wonder, is there any substantive explanation on why it's so bad for so long?
> Perhaps there's hope yet. Snow Leopard had nearly two years of refinements to achieve the level of polish and stability its name has become synonymous with today.
Not really, it's more like it has years of memory loss leading to a bunch of bugs like in this blog to be forgotten and the marketing tag taken over. So definitely there is hope, just wait a decade...
I started writing a list of UX and software bugs in Mac OS, but honestly, I don't have the energy or time, there are so many. Mac OS has become an absolute travesty of an OS.
It's the worst desktop OS there is.. except for all the others.
Anything prior to that is anything goes, in my experience.
Just one small thing to add about the Color Picker: I think it's a good example of how native UI apps have changed over the last decade.
The macOS Color Picker is nice. The idea is to have a single color picker for the whole system. It's extensible, so apps can add their own custom pickers (for example, an OKLCH picker), and you can reuse your palettes across applications.
Sounds great! But most of the applications where you might care about those features (customization, sharing your color schemes, etc.) don't work with the native Color Picker: Figma, Adobe apps, all Electron-based apps, and so on. So the Color Picker's features are useless. That component of the system is exactly the same as it was when I got my first Mac in 2007.
There are multiple nice native features that apps don't use; over time, they become forgotten and barely maintained.
I don't know what the solution is, but at some point, I think Apple should take frameworks like Tauri or Electron into account and build integrations for developers who use them. I know the integrations exists (they are the native APIs), and it's the developers' responsibility to use them, but that's not happening, and it ends up affecting the UX.
in practice, developers will not use them. they think they have better ideas and they don't care about platform or the user as an abstraction over the platform. they could use the existing thing.
it's the same mindset that has automakers not wanting to support CarPlay. they think they can do it better or just as well and it's completely missing the point: the user doesn't want to fuck with their custom one-off UI.
I haven't yet come around. Unix had it figured out back in CDE days. i3 was my happy place... now it's Niri. As long as I can get to my workspace with a key combo THAT I DEFINE, I'm probably okay.
Another instance in watch os is the total removal of access to the app switcher And quick jump to precious app. It’s been driving me nuts.
I thought my machine was broken. Turns out this is a known bug with window managers (????????)
The sporadic nature of it had me question my own sanity.
Edit: Thanks for the tip about killing the dock to get the keyboard shortcuts working. That was driving me mad. Do you have to do that every restart, or will those just work now?
I have had to work around it with the most hacky scripts possible, and it's been so annoying trying to maintain all those scripts over the years.
Rather than rebooting, I just kill "pboard" in Activity Monitor, and afterwards restart a few GUI programs that were directly affected (including Finder and Dock.)
My wild theory is that Firefox is the culprit. At least the issues happened more frequently once I had to switch to Firefox for proper content blocking extensions. Anyway… I have no idea how to prove that, so it's just a guess, not a blame.
It’s crazy because they have (or had) something like $100bn in cash. Spending 0.5% of that per year on software (development, bug-fixing, performance, and QA) would help tremendously. They’d be insurmountable.
I know “they don’t have to”, but they don’t have to do a lot of things that they do on the hardware side. They choose to.
You’re over thinking things. People made a closed statement. It isn’t meant as a multiple paragraph essay on the progression of macOS over the timeline of 20 years. But that doesn’t make the statement any less valid.
> It doesn't make any sense for the conversation to just stop there
The conversation didn’t stop there. We are having it still right now.
> and implicitly forgive all of the regressions 26 brought as water under the bridge.
That’s not what the aforementioned statement claims. You’re adding your own emphasis here, an emotive slant which skews the statement to mean something it didn’t.
> macOS 15 isn't just some nebulous hypothetical alternative, it's a readily-available example of what Apple actually shipped in recent history, and it should be a point of reference in discussions like this. Narrowly focusing on 27 vs 26 while ignoring 15 doesn't make any more sense than praising Windows 8.1 for fixing some problems from Windows 8 when neither was worth upgrading from Windows 7 for most people.
The reason 15 was referenced was because it’s an incremental improvement rather than introducing big new features. Just like 27 is. So in that regard, it makes more sense to compare 27 to 26 than include all of the other points of reference that you are.
———
I’m usually the first to criticise macOS. I only hate it slightly less than Windows. But you’re making emotive claims to an objective statement and complaining that others aren’t doing the same.