Pros & Cons
Apple's macOS Tahoe is by far the most stunning and convenience-rich upgrade to the company's desktop operating system in the last decade. Between its radical Liquid Glass design overhaul and new customization options, you get far more control over how your system looks than ever before. Meanwhile, Apple introduces welcome calling and messaging enhancements, super-efficient keyboard shortcuts, and unprecedented Spotlight features that make it a productivity marvel. I have mixed feelings about some aspects of the Liquid Glass design, but the latest version of macOS is otherwise a terrific (and stable) success. Tahoe is an easy Editors' Choice winner thanks to its flexible customization options, innovative productivity tweaks, and spectacularly uniform look.
Can Your Mac Run Tahoe?
You can upgrade to macOS Tahoe on any silicon-based Apple desktop or laptop for free. The new version supports the M1 and M4 chips and everything in between. Alternatively, you can install Tahoe on a very few Intel-based models, specifically the 13-inch MacBook Pro (2020), 16-inch MacBook Pro (2019), 27-inch iMac (2020), or Mac Pro (2019). If your Intel-based Mac is an older model, you’re out of luck.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)Tahoe will be the last macOS version to support Intel-based Macs. Apple has also warned developers that it will severely reduce the functionality of the Rosetta 2 emulation layer—the software that lets Intel-based macOS apps run under Apple silicon—for the version that comes after Tahoe. In other words, Apple is decisively moving away from supporting non-silicon Macs.
What's New in macOS Tahoe?
Here are the biggest changes in macOS 26 in order of importance:
- Apple's Liquid Glass software design ushers in an interface that is spectacularly more attractive—but with a few distracting details.
- The iOS Phone app arrives on the Mac desktop. It includes a Hold Assist feature that lets you focus on something else while waiting on hold for an agent to take your call. The app will ring when it detects that someone is talking on the other end.
- Many of the most useful phone features come to Tahoe. Live Activities, for example, can show you the arrival time of your rideshare.
- Spotlight gains hundreds of helpful ways to help you search for data and perform complex actions.
- The automated Shortcut feature gets new conveniences formerly available only to advanced users who were comfortable with the AppleScript scripting language.
- Calls and Messages support live translation, meaning they will automatically translate what you say or type into the recipient's language. Then, it will translate that recipient's reply into your language.
Keep in mind that many of these features rely on Apple silicon hardware. Plenty more changes are worth getting excited about, too.
Interface and Design: Liquid Glass Takes Over
The most spectacular change in Tahoe is the semi-translucent interface that Apple calls Liquid Glass. It takes many of its cues from the visionOS operating system that Apple's Vision Pro mixed-reality headset uses. Everything is brighter and more colorful, and the design has the large rounded corners and vivid toolbars that Apple also applied to iOS 26. All the core apps get bright new icons, and the whole user interface looks more cohesive than before. For example, Apple color-coordinates the dock and toolbars with the colors of your desktop background. Otherwise, the macOS menu bar is transparent by default, leaving its icons floating over the desktop. I found this distracting, so you might want to switch this off.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)Everything looks livelier than ever, but the new interface design means that sidebars and toolbars appear inside rounded, shaded rectangles within app windows. As a result, most windows look more cluttered than before, and the narrow border surrounding the app window seems like wasted space. I couldn't find a way to tone these features down, and it seems at least possible that Apple designed Liquid Glass partly for the sake of gee-whiz marketing instead of improving ease of use and efficiency.
On the subject of toning things down, Apple finally makes it easy to tone down the blindingly bright blue folder icons that have been the default in macOS for many years. Now, I can apply any color I like, with an option to make folders lighter or darker depending on the time of day—when Apple resolves to change a feature, it doesn’t go halfway. This set of folder customization options outclasses anything available for any other desktop OS, either natively or via third-party software.
Not only can you specify the Folder Color, but you can also stamp individual folders with any of dozens of symbols and emojis to mark folders, much in the same way that macOS identifies the Application, Home, and other folders. Other design tweaks clearly aim to improve your productivity. For the first time, macOS includes an option to link a folder's color to its color-coded Tag (the colorful dot to the left of a file or folder in Finder listings).
Liquid Glass comes with other interface changes. You can make subtle adjustments to widgets' contrast and transparency settings, for example. Some apps, such as Mail, get snappy new icons. Apps in general get rounded corners, while their sidebars gain a tint to match the color of your desktop background.
Fortunately, you can adjust related appearance options in the Settings app, but you can't—and won’t want to—change the new spacious layout of apps like Messages and Contacts, in which horizontal lines separate items that used to crowd each other.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)One of my long-standing annoyances with macOS was the lack of control over the menu bar. Often, an icon that an app automatically added to it would disappear behind my MacBook's webcam notch or another app's menu. Tahoe thankfully gives you the power to choose which icons appear here, but I’m disappointed that it still doesn’t have any convenient way to find hidden icons. I might still turn to the third-party Barbee or Bartender apps for their abilities to add a secondary, drop-down menu. Tahoe's native options are a major improvement, but still incomplete.
Calling and Notifications: More Parity With iOS
MacOS already includes the iPhone Mirroring capability, which displays your phone screen in a window on your desktop, meaning you can run most of your iPhone apps without leaving your Mac. (Some banking and finance apps that require the highest level of security don't support this feature.) Tahoe adds the full Phone app, so you don’t need to deal with the cramped iPhone Mirroring interface to see your recent and missed calls and voicemails or dial a number.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)The macOS version of the Phone app includes features from the iOS 26 version. The best of these is the aforementioned Hold Assist. Meanwhile, a Call Screening feature asks unknown callers to state their name and the reason for the call—something that you had to use pricey third-party apps for in the past. I find the Phone app to be a major productivity booster. You can leave your phone in another room and avoid the temptation to doomscroll, while still being able to make, receive, and screen calls.
Your Mac can also now receive Live Activity notifications that normally require a phone, such as those related to the arrival of a rideshare or a food delivery. If you choose to allow this, the notifications that appear on your phone’s lock screen will also appear on your Mac.
Search Improvements: Spotlight Gets More Granular, Helpful
The fast, intelligent Spotlight search feature has always outclassed anything in Windows, and it gains massive improvements in Tahoe. When you click inside the Spotlight search field, four icons appear to the right of it. Click on the first icon (or type Cmd-1) to search applications, starting with a window that resembles the iOS App Library. A row of buttons at the top of the window lets you zero in on app categories, such as games, productivity, and utilities. Incidentally, this menu replaces the Launchpad app, which was still available in an early Tahoe beta, but later disappeared. I never used Launchpad, but a web search can tell you the terminal commands that will bring it back if you want it back. I strongly recommend against using those commands, however, since they completely disable all the terrific features in the new Spotlight interface in the process.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)Choose the second icon (or type Cmd-2) to search for files that open in Pages, Preview, or other apps; a set of buttons under the search field lets you select between these filters. Press the third icon (or type Cmd-3) to bring up the Actions menu. Here, you see a long menu of options, such as “Create Folder,” “Send Email,” or "Start Timer.” Each performs the action without making you open the relevant app and find the action in a menu. Best of all, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to any action, and Tahoe populates the menu with a sample shortcut, such as “sm” for Send Message. All the other actions have an “Add Quick Keys” option, which lets you set a string of one or more keys as a shortcut. This is the most user-friendly automation technique I’ve seen in any operating system I've tested.
Finally, select the fourth icon to the right of the Spotlight field (or type Cmd-4) to surface your clipboard history; you can now recover something you copied earlier without a third-party app. Because you might not want your clipboard history to be visible to everyone with access to your Mac, Spotlight requires you to enable this feature the first time you use it; a drop-down menu in the Spotlight window takes you to the Settings app, where you can disable this feature or clear the clipboard history.
If you can’t remember what number to press with the Cmd key, just hold down that key and type 1 through 4 to cycle through the available options. This is a superb implementation of a much-needed feature.
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Automation: Shortcuts Are More Useful Than Ever
Apple has always led the pack in automation features, starting with AppleScript, which is still going strong since its 1993 debut. Then, in 2005, the company introduced the Automator as a way to automate complex actions by combining building blocks. Both are powerful but have fairly steep learning curves. That's why Apple launched the easier-to-use (but less powerful) Shortcuts app on iOS first, and then macOS.
With Tahoe, the Shortcuts app is finally gaining automation features that previously required AppleScript or the Automation app. For instance, you can now work with trigger actions, such as when you add a file to a “hot” folder, receive an email from a specific sender, or your Mac's battery falls below a certain percentage. Being able to easily build automations with these events makes it much easier to streamline work processes. I'm glad to use Shortcuts rather than the fussy and fiddly AppleScript functions that I currently rely upon.
Live Translation: Communicate With Anyone
Apple’s translation feature seems at least equal (if not superior) to those from Google and Microsoft. Whenever I select text in a photo on my phone or Mac and ask Apple to translate it, the results are always impressive.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)With Tahoe, the Messages and Phone apps support real-time translation. As mentioned, that means you can text or talk with someone who uses another language, with each of you getting the other's message in your language. According to "Star Trek," this technology isn't supposed to exist until the twenty-second century. Some third-party apps already translate text messages in real time, but Apple's solution is the first to make real-time text and voice messaging available to anyone who uses iOS or macOS.
Messages gets a few eye-catching interface tweaks, such as custom backgrounds for conversations. But other features, such as color-coded typing indicators in group messages that indicate who is typing, polls for group chats, screening for unknown numbers, and spam filters, are even more useful. I still want the Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp features that enable you to remove messages from one or both sides of a conversation, but I appreciate these improvements to Messages nonetheless.
Apple Intelligence: Still a Work in Progress
Apple raised great expectations when it announced Apple Intelligence in 2024, along with a revamped Siri that could perform tasks involving multiple apps. The company hasn't fulfilled its biggest promises, but some Apple Intelligence features in Tahoe are still worth having.
You can enable these features during installation or later from the Settings app. Once this package downloads and installs, you can use Apple Intelligence basically in the same way you would ChatGPT to generate, proofread, rewrite, or summarize text. Don't use anything but the proofreading option if you are sending a message to someone you care about, because the results have the bland tell-tale style of AI-generated prose.
A Summarize button appears at the top of every message in the Mail app, but I found that I could skim a thread more quickly than it could produce a summary. Additionally, some of the summaries broke off in the middle of a sentence with no obvious way to read the missing text. All this confirms my sense that, for the foreseeable future, natural intelligence is more efficient and smarter than the artificial kind when you work with text.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)Otherwise, Apple Intelligence shines with Live Translation in the FaceTime, Messages, and Phone apps. You can even use ChatGPT directly within the Apple Intelligence interface (you can sign into your paid ChatGPT account directly).
The Image Playground app doesn’t inspire much confidence and is mostly useful for non-serious tasks. Until I turned on the ChatGPT option, it didn’t understand many of my requests. Even when it did, it opted for the overly cute cartoonish style that Apple favors. I asked Image Playground to create an image of Tim Cook wearing a beret to test it. Image Playground produced an image of a cool twenty-something in a beret without ChatGPT, but enabling that functionality resulted in a more convincing image.
I have to admit that I had fun with the Genmoji feature, which lets you create a new emoji by describing it. So, for example, when you are writing an email or message, you can click on the emoji icon, enter a description like “blueberry pie with ice cream,” and choose among five emoji that express that theme.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)More System Updates: Improvements Abound
Dozens of other, more minor improvements make Tahoe well worth the upgrade. Here are some additional updates to the core apps:
- Clock lets you adjust the snooze feature to last between one and 15 minutes; you no longer have to deal with the old default of nine minutes.
- Journal arrives from iOS, with the ability to create multiple journals and insert pictures inline with text.
- Notes can export text into Markdown format.
- Passwords gains a history feature that lists the old passwords you have used on any site.
- Photos adds the Pinned Collections feature from the iOS version.
- Safari now hides all data that third-party snoopers can use to detect your digital fingerprint.
- Terminal finally gets the customizable color and theme options that have long been available with third-party alternatives.
Developers will notice some obscure changes deep in the OS. An especially interesting one is a new format for “sparsebundle” disk images that Time Machine and other virtualization software utilize. Apple claims that the new Apple Sparse Image Format (ASIF) supports quicker disk reads and writes than existing formats, which should result in faster emulation of Windows systems on a Mac. The Windows 11 system I have running in Parallels Desktop on my M4 Mac already feels snappier than Windows 11 on my brand-new Intel-based desktop PC, and I look forward to even faster performance in the future.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)One new feature that I couldn’t test is a Repair Assistant, which becomes available after you or a third-party technician replaces a part on your Mac. A Parts & Services menu appears on the General tab in System Settings, and gives you access to calibration tools that calibrate or test the replacement parts. A similar feature is arriving in iOS 26 and iPadOS 26.
How to Try Out Tahoe Without Any Risk
I use two Macs, one mostly for testing, the other as my daily driver. Tahoe runs faultlessly, quickly, and smoothly on my testing machine, where I upgraded from Sequoia to the Tahoe release version. I’m tempted to upgrade my daily-driver machine from Sequoia to Tahoe, too, but I’ll try to hold out for the first point release (version 26.1) on the off-chance that some obscure bug gets in the way of some of my more obscure apps. If you use only apps from Apple and other major developers, then you don’t need to wait to update.
The easiest way to upgrade from Sequoia to Tahoe is simply to wait for your Mac to prompt you to upgrade and click through the related prompts. If you don’t see the upgrade option in your System Settings app, just wait a few days for it to appear. But if your life and work depend on your Mac running smoothly, then you can try out Tahoe side-by-side with your existing Sequoia system, and upgrade your Sequoia system when you’re ready.
Start by opening the Disk Utility app on your Mac. You should see a screen with data about your current system. In the toolbar, click the plus sign under Volume. Fill in a name, such as “Tahoe,” for the new volume, and then click Add. Once the new volume appears, quit Disk Utility.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)Next, open the App Store, search for macOS Sequoia, click View, and choose Get. When you see a prompt asking if you are sure you want to download it, click Download. When the Install macOS Sequoia dialog opens, click through until you see the option to install Sequoia on your current disk. At this step, click “Show All Disks…” and then choose your new “Tahoe” disk as the installation target. Proceed to install Sequoia on your new disk. When the system starts up, you can choose to import your apps and settings from your existing system, sign in with your current Apple ID, or provide a different Apple ID. If you have enough disk space to duplicate your current system, I would let the installer copy everything from your current system so that you can test Tahoe with everything you use now. Still, you can save time by simply using your current Apple ID and not importing your apps.
With this setup, you can always switch back from Tahoe to your Sequoia system by opening the Settings app and choosing your Sequoia system from the Startup Disk menu. When you’re ready to upgrade your older Sequoia system to Tahoe, and you don’t need the test system any longer, simply boot into Sequoia, go to the Disk Utility, and delete the "Tahoe" volume. Then go to System Settings and upgrade to Tahoe from the Software Update tab.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Apple)