macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess

https://www.squareorbits.com/blog/2026/09/macos-golden-gate-is-a-buggy-mess/

107•SquareOrbits•59m ago

Comments

ErneX•33m ago

I noticed the Quick Look animation (space bar on any file) is very sluggish, at least on my M2 Max.

zitterbewegung•31m ago

These visual UI problems which are showing some sloppiness in the UI is much better than macOS 26 and honestly I really like Golden Gate for more efficiency and the fact that Siri actually works now and can replace a great deal of things I usually would have googled.

tannhaeuser•30m ago

Can Golden Gate really be considered a fix release for Tahoe with its massive AI updates?

bichonnages•29m ago

There are so many new bugs…

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…

aaronbrethorst•29m ago

I've been running Golden Gate since the first beta was released in June. I've generally been very happy with it. I think it'll take a couple years to unwind the Alan Dye era, but Golden Gate is a significant improvement over macOS 26

Razengan•28m ago

So is iOS

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?

delfinom•21m ago

We are seeing the benefits in real time in this release if those images mean anything lol

gukov•21m ago

At this point you gotta think Apple is not using AI, or using too much AI, or using AI incorrectly. But then again, it’s not just them —- it’s everyone, really.

egypturnash•18m ago

A friend who quit Apple a month or two ago left mostly because the whole company was utterly AI-pilled and they couldn’t take being a meat proxy talking to other meat proxies any more.

I sure ain’t upgrading my Mac any time soon if I can help it.

mcphage•20m ago

These are the benefits.

antfarm•27m ago

It looks like Tahoe is about to become the new Snow Leopard.

king_crimson•25m ago

What I notice is that the entire OS feels very laggy. Many interactions just don’t feel as snappy anymore as before. The worst candidate for this is definitely Mission Control, it has become a total dumpster fire in my opinion. (BTW: running on an M4 Pro MBP)

oefrha•25m ago

I don’t understand why System Settings search is such a dumpster fire. It’s up to a couple thousand (probably overestimating) fixed text labels. Even when it’s not bugging out, half or more of deeper labels simply can’t be found even if you enter the exact string. Who the hell thought this sorry ass search is okay to ship and keep it that way after this many years? I swear even Windows’ settings search is more capable.

dilap•14m ago

It was fine until a few releases ago, then they rewrote it, and it sucks now. Had to give it that SwiftUI magic.

oefrha•10m ago

Yes, IIRC System Preferences was fine (hopefully not rose-tinted glasses), it became the current piece of shit when it was reborn as iOS-sibling System Settings, in Ventura?

vachina•24m ago

Still rocking a Sonoma and everything works, without the liquid glass slop.

dewey•23m ago

I haven't noticed any bigger bugs (Apart from search in System Settings still not working), the main annoyance is the Siri bubble showing up next to text fields.

monegator•22m ago

definitive proof that apple's engineers are using GNOME workstations internally: now MacOS system apps look like any software created using that garbage pile called libadwaita.

arnaudsm•21m ago

At least Gnome doesn't have liquid glass

phoronixrly•11m ago

Are you crazy? libadwaita looks way, way more polished and consistent than anything I've seen on macos for the last at least 5 years. And only one of these is an open-source project with a limited budget.

tiahura•21m ago

It’s 25 years old at this point and got lapped by Gnome & kde at least 10 years ago.

It’s time for some apple internal honesty about the state of MacOS gui.

rw_panic0_0•21m ago

am I the only one not liking the black tint in Spotlight?

mcphage•20m ago

I'm sure there's plenty of actual bugs, but a list of places where alignment is off by a few pixels ain't it, chief.

getpost•20m ago

This isn't a new bug, it was present in MacOS Tahoe, but what happened to the tabs in the Maps app? The View menu still has Show Tab Bar and Show All Tabs itms, but they are always greyed-out. Cmd-T doesn't open a new tab, as was the case before Tahoe. (I count this as a bug in that the UI seems inconsistent with the function.) If anyone knows how to regain access to tabs, I'd love to hear it.

amelius•14m ago

> This isn't a new bug

They don't just mention one bug here.

Especially worrying is the last bug, which hangs the entire system.

Conlectus•8m ago

I recommend reading more than the first two clauses of the above comment.

skullone•18m ago

MacOS has felt like AI slop since before there was AI. I'm a decades long mac user, and there's simply no excuse for how sloppy their releases have become

_doctor_love•18m ago

I was chatting with a friend about the Decline and Fall of Apple over the weekend. We both miss Steve Jobs.

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...

JV00•18m ago

If anybody from Apple is reading, just give this article link to claude or codex and have it fixed! The work has already being done for you!

dylan604•17m ago

Have they fixed getting a name server over VPN?

echelon_musk•17m ago

macOS 15 is the last usable release.

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.

replete•16m ago

I'm so glad I stayed on Sequoia, gonna wait this mess out

solarpunk_enthu•16m ago

What gets me is people saying macOs 26 -> 27 is an improvement. Maybe so. But Sequoia -> 26 -> 27 is still a noticeable downgrade. So is it really an improvement: making something much worse and then slightly improving it?

UqWBcuFx6NV4r•11m ago

Yes, it is. How can’t you follow this logic? It is an upwards trajectory. Genuinely, what are you missing about this? Two things can be true at the same time. Nobody said that there had been a historical downward trajectory. Well, at least, in your description of what “gets you”. But I’ve never really seen many people arguing that macOS hasn’t degraded over the past ~10-15 years. The fact that’s “getting you” s still worth noting and not every online comment has to be a complete, comprehensive accounting of someone’s entire position. Some things are just left unsaid because there’s a shared understanding. At this point I think that “macOS had generally gotten worse” is easily one of those.

thoughtpalette•16m ago

iMessage (Messages) doesn't work for me after upgrading. Downgrading to macOS 26 looks to be a chore so I guess I'm just SOL until it gets patched.

sikozu•15m ago

I have been avoiding new macOS versions since I tried Tahoe and hated it. Still on Sequoia.

I don't know if I'll ever upgrade to Golden Gate, and this blog post isn't giving me confidence.

gbil•13m ago

While generally happy with the speed improvements it brought, I can't back question the presence of testers on Apple side. Sure they are a small niche company (/s) but they can do better. Major example, desktop switching shortcuts are borked after device comes up from sleep! >https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1whtmc3/macos_27_mis...

galad87•12m ago

Mission Control is unusable in macOS 27. Shortcuts to switch spaces stop working (Dock must be killed to get them to work again), there is a padding between spaces thumbnails and the top of the screen so it's no longer possible to just easily move the mouse at the top to select one, windows rearrange randomly when one is clicked, full screen app spaces breaks each time you try to use them, animations are wonky and you can't reenter mission control while some animations are running, etc…

mikeocool•5m ago

Pretty sure Apple must dedicate a product manager to coming up with new ways to break spaces in each OS release.

gjstein•4m ago

I also genuinely cannot believe how broken Mission Control is. I use it constantly and the flickering, black spaces, and other small issues lead to an overall frustrating experience I did not have in 26. I'm very surprised that these issues didn't come up on HN from all the beta users, many reporting that they're very happy with 27. Is Mission Control a feature that those likely to download the beta are disproportionately unlikely to use?

osdjeicjejcjjr•11m ago

So no one’s gonna mention that this guy thought NSText was a reference to NeXTSTEP?

robin_reala•9m ago

I’m not a Mac developer: what does the NS stand for?

meindnoch•8m ago

NeXTSTEP.

Objective-C doesn't have namespaces (like C), so people use two-letter prefixes on their types to prevent name clashes. The NS prefix is used by Apple's Foundation and AppKit frameworks, that originated from NeXTSTEP, hence NS.

sedawkgrep•8m ago

I'm pretty sure all the NS* calls and references in MacOS are from NextSTEP.

waffletower•5m ago

It is; in MacOS NSText is a Cocoa API which arrived and evolved from NeXTstep.

2OEH8eoCRo0•9m ago

Look at Apple's market cap and salary ranges before reading this article.

dinkblam•7m ago

not to mention that the Music app that has been completely destroyed in macOS 26 is still completely unusable

sajithdilshan•6m ago

The author of this article is basically me when I’m bored, just trying to find some problems to complain about

boringg•5m ago

Just AI it /s

nozzlegear•5m ago

[delayed]

thought_alarm•4m ago

The golden rule with MacOS is never update before February, or after August.

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.

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