Why I’m Holding Off On Upgrading to MacOS Tahoe 26 For Now

If you’re anything like me, you’re typically excited about new operating systems being released, but also approach with a little hesitation. After diving right into iOS 26 on iPhone, I regretted it for various reasons including some Liquid Glass annoyances, sluggishness, and battery drain (though my opinions are rapidly evolving, more on that separately!), and so I am taking a much more cautious approach regarding installing MacOS Tahoe 26 on my MacBook Air.

I’m certainly intrigued by MacOS Tahoe 26 and its newness, but my Mac is used almost exclusively for work and productivity, and I am going to sit on the sidelines a bit longer to wait and see. I’ve seen enough feedback, gripes, complaints, social media threads, forum posts, and reviews, and this article is going to discuss how I arrived at my currently paused position on MacOS Tahoe.

1: Liquid Glass & Interface Changes can make usability difficult

MacOS Tahoe 26 adopts the new Liquid Glass interface and visual overhaul, which features a lot more transparency, translucency, motion, animations, reduced contrast, frostiness, and sort of a cartoonish look in places, that, all combined, to my eyes make the interface less usable. I already find this to be the case with iOS 26 and it’s partly why I’m frustrated with Liquid Glass in iOS 26 for iPhone, but I don’t want to deal with this on my Mac.

There are many stories, gripes, and complaints online of Mac users who are frustrated with MacOS Tahoe and Liquid Glass and who express challenges with usability, and I’m just not interested in that frustration right now.

What is your opinion here, do you find Liquid Glass and the interface changes to make usability more difficult on the Mac? Leave a comment at the bottom of this article and share your thoughts.

2: Liquid Glass can reduce legibility for some

Another common theme of complaints about Liquid Glass, not just for Tahoe by the way, is that general legibility is reduced, text is harder to read, and that visual elements are more cluttered. Low contrast interface elements and heavy transparency, plus visual clutter, can make everything blend together and harder to differentiate.

Look, my eyesight isn’t perfect, and I already use corrective lenses. My eyes tire easily when looking at screens already, and a reduction in contrast, blurry interface elements that seem to blend together, and text that is harder to read because of design language decisions, just sound like more friction in my digital interactions, and it’s not something I want to deal with on my Mac at this point.

Some of the typical tweaks to fix text legibility issues are not effective in MacOS Tahoe, like “Increase Contrast” which, EclecticLight describes as “the predominant effect is the outlining of controls within each window, rather than any change in contrast.”. I actually do like outlining of controls, but what I like more than that is contrast of those controls and any text on the screen.

What do you think, do you find Liquid Glass on MacOS Tahoe to reduce legibility of text and interface elements? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of the article!

3: Mixed reports of apps crashing and incompatibilities

A notable number of online complaints for MacOS Tahoe have to do with app incompatibilities, or equally frustrating, with certain apps just outright crashing in MacOS Tahoe. This is likely more situation depending on the apps you use, and your specific hardware, but again I need to use my Mac for productivity on a daily basis and I can’t afford to have major app issues right now. These reports are scattered around social media and the web, and cover many different apps, including some default apps from Apple.

What has been your experience, have you encountered any major app incompatibilities or problems with apps crashing in MacOS Tahoe? Whatever the case, share your experiences in the comments below the article!

4: Miscellaneous complaints about bugs, performance, battery life, wi-fi, etc

If you wade into the waters of Apple Support forums, MacRumors forums, reddit, X/Twitter, Bluesky, Mastadon, and the like, you’ll inevitably find the usual complaints that come with any new operating system release; general bugs, problems with performance, reduced battery life, wi-fi connection issues, internet connectivity issues, bluetooth dropping, etc etc. Some of these complaints might be because of Tahoe, some of them might be standard behavior after any major update (like temporary slowdowns and battery performance drops are), and some could even be due to bugs in MacOS Tahoe itself.

I don’t know about any of this, but again my primary usage of a Mac is to work and be productive, and right now MacOS Sequoia is rock solid so I don’t see any need to tempt fate quite yet.

If you have jumped onto Tahoe already, do you have any major complaints or issues, bad bugs, or has it been smooth sailing? Share those with us in the comments at the bottom of this article, we want to know.

I am waiting for MacOS Tahoe 26.1

Since I am holding off on updating my Mac right away, my current plan is to wait for MacOS Tahoe 26.1, which I assume will fix any of the major issues and bugs that are impacting early Tahoe users. I suspect we will also see some changes introduced to help issues around legibility and accessibility for the Liquid Glass interface too.

Trying MacOS Tahoe without commitment

I will continue to explore and use MacOS Tahoe 26, but just not as my primary operating system. The safest way for me to tinker with Tahoe is to use a virtual machine, which is so easy to setup on an Apple Silicon Mac that it offers a really easy way to try out MacOS Tahoe without having to fully commit to replacing Sequoia with it.

Articles we have covered in the past for running Tahoe in virtual machines that could be helpful are:

• How to run MacOS Tahoe 26 in UTM (article was written for the beta but it works the exact same with final release)
• How to run MacOS Tahoe with tart VM (also written with the beta in mind, but works the same on final, but tart uses the command line to setup)

You’ll want the final macOS Tahoe 26 installer file or IPSW for this, which you can always grab from here.

Using MacOS Tahoe 26 in a virtual machine allows you to try out Tahoe without fully committing to the upgrade as your primary operating system, and for me this is a perfectly adequate solution as I wait for the first major update to Tahoe to address some of the common user complaints out there.

Final thoughts

MacOS Tahoe 26 has many bright spots and some nice new features, and the new interface change to Liquid Glass can be really quite aesthetically pleasing in some scenarios, but for me right now, I need to wait until MacOS Tahoe has a bit more polish applied. As it is right now, it feels like Apple prioritized the new visual look over functionality, and that’s enough to make me hold off for the time being. As Apple continues to iterate on Tahoe, it’ll undoubtedly be improved, and the concerns that I have will hopefully be allayed, otherwise I might just have to update in resignation.

And who knows, maybe I will throw caution to the wind and jump aboard MacOS Tahoe 26 on my Mac, just like I put iOS 26 on my iPhone, and initially hate it, but then quickly grow to appreciate it? That’s basically how my experience with the new OS and Liquid Glass interface on iPhone was for me, and I’ll cover that little rollercoaster of a journey in another article.

What about you? Where do you stand on MacOS Tahoe 26, Liquid Glass, the new interfaces, any bugs or major issues, or perhaps it has been a fantastic trouble free experience for you that has improved your workflow? Tell us your experiences and thoughts in the comments, we are always interested in learning from you too!