Installed the release of macOS 26 (Tahoe) yesterday.
Aesthetically I’m not a fan of what they’ve done on either the macOS or iOS/iPadOS sides of the 26 releases. I’m a pretty chill guy about that sort of thing generally and just try to roll with whatever they deem appropriate — aesthetics like this have a lot of subjective qualities, and I don’t imagine myself to be a great judge so I just assume they’re the experts — but wow, it is seriously ugly.
The ridiculous rounded corners that are dated to begin with, but different apps and even platform features see laughably varying radii. The awful translucency that makes many apps and controls visually confusing, ruining the visual clarity of the display. The control bar on the Music app, for instance, is just just a mess: Gray controls on a translucent background where album covers beneath force you to have to spend mental effort interpreting what you’re seeing. Obnoxious animations that don’t help with affordances at all.
Ugh.
I can roll with all that. It’s ugly and with vastly reduced usability, but…whatever.
Woke up to find my Mac unusable, having exhausted all of its memory overnight. For those who have ever encountered this, even after you’ve force quit the culprit consuming 90%+ of the memory, it’s still almost impossible to make the machine usable short of a reboot. macOS deals with memory exhaustion very poorly.
The culprit was Messages (aka iMessage), sitting at 60GB+ and still trying to acquire more. I wonder how much of my SSD wear it rolled through paging garbage out endlessly through the night. Good times. At least I have Applecare+.
It wasn’t some esoteric new service or JetBrains app eating all the memory, but instead one of the most banal core apps on the platform.
Best I can tell, my brother-in-law sent an overnight message in a fantasy football group sharing a funny video. While my Mac was napping, it momentarily wakes for things like this and it seems that sent it spiralling. So that’s nice. I’ve disabled waking for network access and now sit with activity monitor open and Stats running in the menu bar. Sad.
Foreboding. Every indication is that Tahoe is going to be a disastrous release.