Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” Alerts
robservatory.com199 points by todsacerdoti 13 hours ago
199 points by todsacerdoti 13 hours ago
I accidentally hit the wrong button a few weeks ago and upgraded to Tahoe. I didn't think it was that big a deal at the time, I'd just been putting it off.
But having used it for a few weeks now I can confirm it is a strict downgrade over Sequoia for me. I use none of the new features it has introduced, and the changes to existing features are just worse.
Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro. The Finder has gone from fine to janky once again, especially with horizontal scroll. The window corners and mouse interactions are indeed annoying (I'd assumed the many complaints were at least slight hyperbole). Left-aligned window titles are unbalanced and ugly. I've had weird (visual) app duplication issues with the Application smart-folder in the Dock. Cross-device copy-paste SEEMS to be more flaky than usual. And most petty of all I really don't like the new icons - especially the Trash icon for some reason.
I did the same mistake a few weeks ago ; my company enforces security updates and I picked the Tahoe update instead of the security one. I told myself, what the hell, might as well give it a try!
I wiped my computer and reinstalled Sequoia last week.
Also Apple Music is much worse (harder to bring miniplayer, seek bar harder to use) and list of misfeatures goes on and on and on
You have to give Apple credit where credit is due. They have managed to make first iTunes and now Music worse with every release. Which is truly amazing.
Oh man, that's concerning since it was already terrible on Sonoma. I've been using Museeks for years now.
Good to know. My dad recently asked and I didn't know the pros/cons. I haven't upgraded but that's because I don't have a need to. He has a new Mac mini, and I thought it might make sense for him. But it sounds like it's not an upgrade, and is possibly a downgrade, especially if it will make things harder to find.
I've also had a proper Thunderbolt display freak out where the entire desktop just suddenly decides to ultra-saturate/ultra-contrast. Happened twice, across restarts. After the second restart it stopped, but I can't explain it and nothing like it has happened before/since/with other machines I connect to the screen with the same cable.
Not sure about "harder to find" but the sheer number of unexplainable glitches and slowness means I wouldn't otherwise have upgraded had I known. Waiting for a higher 26.X release might be worthwhile.
I have Tahoe on my work laptop and Sequoia on my personal desktop, and the thing that keeps me the most rooted on Sequoia is the padding. Everything on Tahoe is padded to hell and back. And the new tab design sucks so much. iTerm2 tabs look fucking terrible in it.
they have really tried hard to make the entire OS less usable. I'm not an "iToddler", I paid for a Unix workstation and will not have lower information density forced onto me.
Same - 13" macbook screen becomes less functional when you fill it with padding.
> Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro
On an M4 Pro! Pure planned obsecelence. Noticed it regularly with major MacOS releases. Nothing will convince me otherwise.
I got an M5 and it unfortunately had Tahoe preinstalled. Out of the box, Quicklook is choppy. My non-Tahoe M1 is buttery smooth. I don't know how Apple managed to ruin a feature that's been running smoothly for decades.
Yikes. That’s terrible (it’s a great feature[+]).
[+]just discovered this, thanks Sindre who I always run into searching: https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins
(but I’m on Sequoia so they work perfectly!)
Anecdotally, I’ve had Tahoe installed for ages now and it runs perfectly smooth on my M1 Pro with an external 4k display as well.
I run a terminal, emacs, and firefox. That's about all I need to work/develop, and I've not noticed anything negative since the upgrade.
I guess I'm not a power-user though.
Hey everyone, I'm the owner of the repo that Rob references in his blog post (https://github.com/travisvn/stop-tahoe-update)
Just wanted to comment to see if I can help answer any questions as well as mentioning that we improved the instructions in the README based on some of the points Rob made a few weeks back.
There really are a large number of us out there that know Tahoe would be a downgrade to their current setup
If you have any ideas on how to improve the resilience of the workarounds, please connect on the GitHub, or just starring the repo would help, as the project would get more attention and hopefully more solutions offered as a result.
It's frustrating to feel like your computer isn't.. yours anymore when you're pushed so insistently like with this "upgrade". Hopefully we can figure out some sustainable ways to get some autonomy back.
I just wanted to thank you for this work. I wouldn’t have known where to start. Reading about all the hoops to jump through I can’t help but think that macOS is getting ever closer to being malware, just like Windows. An OS you have to fight to stay productive. I’ve been a Mac user since 1995, but the way this has been going over so many years now, I can’t imagine my next computer to be yet another Mac any more. I have been forced to view Linux as the last refuge. It was nice while it lasted, but eventually Stallman was right the whole time.
Dear Apple, no latency from brain to action is the greatest design you can possibly have. We want to feel one with the machine. That's the greatest joy and difference between a Mac and a Windows machine. Adding latency to the fastest machine possible is criminal. Please STOP DOING IT with unnecessary animations.
I think you're in the wrong ecosystem if you don't like animations. Over the top animations have been at the core of Apple, I still remember the "drop in the water" animation of OS X Tiger's Dashboard. 20 years ago.
I use their accessibility features to stop all animations I can. Maybe if more people upvote here they will hear us. No point in suffering in silence.
I agree with this entirely:
> no latency from brain to action is the greatest design you can possibly have. We want to feel one with the machine.
But... I used Windows growing up before switching to Linux, and I've been using a Macbook in recent years. Both Windows and Linux can be configured to run with no animation lag, but AFAIK this is just not possible in MacOS. I can't imagine doing anything serious on MacOS with animation log completely interrupting my train of thought or flow state.
I'm no Windows fan, but at least circa 2019, I know Windows 10 could be configured to be similarly snappy and free of laggy animations.
The greatest sin in MacOS is the immense lag when switching desktops ("Spaces"). It's a baffling design decision, I can't believe it's intentional.
The speed of the desktop switching animation also depends on the refresh rate of the monitor, by the way. Baffling.
I think you're overselling it, the minimise? Sure.
But I can't think of a single animation that added a delay to processing on MacOS.
Compare to say, Windows, at least.
Switching desktops on MacOS is a >1 second long animation that blocks input which can't be disabled. It can only be replaced with a fade in/out which is just as long.
Unless you disable ProMotion in favor of static 60Hz. Then it’s reasonably fast again. It’s been broken like that for ages.
No, it’s >1 second on every machine.
I don’t know about your particular case, but there’s lots of people pointing to this exact issue.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/438188/latency-whe...
Try Liquid Glass on iphone. Absolutely horrible if you don’t turn off all the motion.
I honestly don’t understand why Liquid Glass provokes so strong reactions. To me it’s not that radically different from the old design. I don’t love it, and I don’t hate it. There is nothing new that in any way impacts how I use or experience my iPhone, my iPad or my Mac. My reaction to Liquid Glass was pretty much a neutral “looks a little bit different, I guess” before forgetting about it.
I was really nervous about the update to Liquid Glass based on comments like this but my experience has been really positive. I love the new contextual tooltip menu when I try to select text and other thoughtful details. Maybe there’s things I’m not bumping into?
The changes of Liquid Glass are the what everyone is complaining about, right? Previously they were OK at designing UI.
A few weeks ago Apple had a tiny (<10MB) update for media codecs ready to install on my MBP. I expanded the details for that software update and saw that if I had run it, it would also have downloaded and installed Tahoe. Apple is burning so much trust right now with these dark patterns.
Upgrading to Sequoia was a mistake, and so was upgrading to Tahoe.
I like new and shiny software, but these two releases aren't great. Outside of a good amount of bugs. It is wild to me that Apple can't even get their own UI consistent.
Apples own apps are pretty much the only things you can't close. Finder: can't quit. System settings, somehow doesn't expand horizontally (are we still in the 2000s apple?) I haven't felt the liquid glass or whatever too much on the laptop, but I just used one of my family members Iphone today, and man it was distracting, it seems crazy that contrast has gone out the window.
But especially the bugs. Apple should really take a release that is just bug fixing. I had to switch out Spotlight because it kept trying to want to index my entire system, which is hard when you work in both Rust and typescript projects (lots of small files).
Same problem here.
Linux + KDE surpassed Windows many years ago, now I find I also prefer it to the Mac laptops, which are otherwise better only for portability.
Apple need to get their software act together. Such a shame because the hardware is awesome. A near perfect inversion of the era of Tiger on the G4.
Apple is and always has been a hardware company. I would like to use the Linux ecosystem, however there’s simply no laptop other than Mac that is light and powerful and runs 15 hours in battery.
I much prefer to plug a charger every 5 hours (not that much of an inconvenience) than to suffer bad UX and distractions continuously.
Where the hell do people go that they are away from power for 15 hours and are on the computer the whole time? Are they video editing while in the middle of a safari?
And besides, every time I see comments like this, all I can think is that they never have even tried to find a PC laptop that is small, fast and has good battery life. Believe it or not they exist.
Linux + KDE has a significantly worse UI than Tahoe
I’m gonna need a more detailed argument than that.
It isn’t really a worthwhile argument. Linux has so many window managers, whatever somebody likes about MacOS there’s one that does it better.
Started with kde2, then openbox (2000s), then i3 (2010s), these days I got so used to gnome, anything else feels like a downgrade. So probably it is just what you're used to.
I'm a KDE user who is currently on his second stint using a Mac - the last was in 2017. I'm trying to be as objective as possible, but my list of "it works better on Linux" is far longer than the "it works better on Mac" list. I'd love to know your arguments.
KDE’s spacing, fonts, margins, iconography and lack of consistency is painful to look at. Gnome is far outpacing KDE in that regard
> Run the script as described in the project's Read Me
I don’t think this warrants a whole installer script – if you replace UUIDs by hand, you can as well read through the .mobileconfig file and make sure you understand what the profile does, then double click it to install :)
Note that you might also want to remove some other entries from the profile, as, from a glance, those might still delay minor updates by 30 days. (Or does `forceDelayedSoftwareUpdates=false` make these harmless?)
It's much easier to simply use this with whatever date you prefer:
defaults write com.apple.SoftwareUpdate MajorOSUserNotificationDate -date "2030-03-03 12:00:00 +0000"I've got that in place and still get the Tahoe popups, so there's some other mechanism here.
Same for me.
I setup a focus for do not disturb that runs from 12am to 11:59pm every Day.
Have not seen the popup on 4 weeks since I set it up
I’ve used Little Snitch to block the installation of Tahoe. I get a notification every few days, it when I click on it there’s a message that it can’t download the update. Massive stress reducer knowing I can’t accidentally upgrade to Tahoe.
Out of curiosity, how did you go about doing that? That sounds really nice and I'd be interested to see if it could work with LuLu as well.
Much easier: switch to the Sequoia public beta channel!
Exactly. I was going to write this. The "beta" channel, once RTM, becomes the release channel of that version.
Im planning on getting the new M5 MBP i expect to be released next week. Is it possible to downgrade? I assume it comes with Tahoe :(
Typically no, Mac's don't expect to run versions of macOS before the one they were released with.
It’s not worth it, especially since the M6 MBP is rumored to already come out later this year (though likely with a price hike): https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/26/two-unique-new-macbook-pros-a...
Depends on what one is looking for. I'm considering upgrading to an M5 model because while the M6 redesign might come with some nicer specs, it's also going to be coming with some teething pains by virtue of having a new design. The M5 generation is probably going to be a speed bump with a chassis and screen that's a known quantity and has had the kinks smoothed out.
I'm also cautious of the redesign. But I got burned by the first Touchbar Macbook back in the day, so twice shy etc.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/how-to-downgrade-fro... describes how to downgrade.
From that page:
> As a rule of thumb, Macs will not run any version of macOS older than the one they shipped with when they launched. Apple provides security updates for older versions of macOS, but it doesn’t bother backporting drivers and other hardware support from newer versions to older ones.
So the answer is “no”, they probably won’t be able to downgrade on the models that are about to be released.
It's possible if you do a wipe and do a fresh install. You essentially boot into the Sequoia installer. I'm also looking at possibly picking up a M5 MBP and was the first things I looked into.
I bought a refurb m4 mac recently just to avoid tahoe slop ... worth considering, I think.
I read the old forums carefully:
[BIG Warning: this didn't work for child commenter]
- simply decline/reject the TOS on install. It will auto uninstall the installer and go away.
Life has been good since.
I TRUSTED YOU! Nooooooooo!
Anyway, I hope you're happy.
(I thought it would show me a TOS prompt again, but it did not. My bad.)
Interesting, I'm running Sequoia and have never seen that.
However, I'm running Sequoa developer beta. In my system settings under Beta updates, I have "Sequoia developer beta" selected.
At this point it's basically just getting the Sequoa security patches a few days early. But I guess it also suppresses this message?
Comments here paints Tahoe very poorly, and I trust comments here on this topic. This is very bad for Apple as OS from new Macs can not be downgraded and customers like myself will either delay purchases til hopefully next OS fix these issues (not having high hopes) or buy in the 2nd hand market for older OS.
so we're all going to hold onto sequoia like we did snow leopard. only reason i'm not buying a new mac at the moment is because it would force me to upgrade.
the situation is absurd ..
fwiw switching to the sequoia beta channel in system settings killed the nag notifications for me (I believe the profile as defined in OP will stop all updates - which you probably don't want)
I held out.
Then I upgraded my work laptop to test it out. Then my phone. Now my personal laptop.
I actually like it.
Everything is snappier. The glass effects are not nearly as annoying as I expected.
ymmv
I got a work computer that was on Sonoma and had to update. Was prepared to be angry, especially after the time spent updating, and then it's eh, fine. The picture of Lake Tahoe makes me happy.
Adding my opinion: Sequoia was fine and so is Tahoe on a base M2. Can't say I've noticed a usability difference. I also prefer using a trackpad over a mouse and I don't know very many keyboard shortcuts, and I only use one monitor.
I’ve been a pretty die hard Mac user for 25-odd years now (I own a HomePod, for fuck sake), but this is the first time I’ve taken pains to _not_ update to the latest OS. The Tahoe UI/UX is really just inexcusable, and nothing else I’ve heard or seen makes me willing to put up with it. I’m very much hoping they course correct soon, but as sits, my Linux box is suddenly starting to look like the future.
I'm the guy who installs OS betas on their main/only devices (going back to Windows Vista beta) and I don’t think I'll be installing this OS anytime soon. I'm more hoping that they get their act together by September 2026's release.
Might as well just rip off the band aid and learn to suck it up. Fixing Windows and MacOS with these fucking shitty hacks and doesn't work forever. You will be upgraded, like it or not, or be harassed the rest of your life to do so.
Thank you. I own several Macs. One is on Tahoe. It feels the worst. More than myself, though, I need to give my less technical family members a respite from the tricky traps that lead to inadvertently installing it.
As bad as it is, I don't think it is bad in ways that non technical users are likely to notice unfortunately. Mostly because I think years of horrible software have trained people to not have expectations.
Tahoe is still a breath of fresh air compared to Windows, and iOS 26 is still great compared to Android (as I've unfortunately learned from a failed switch attempt).
What makes you say that about Android? I’m a iOS user, but was under the impression that Android was already quite polished, especially the stock experience (as it is with pixel phones)
It comes down mostly to app quality. The apps that are present are not as polished in ways that I found intolerable:
- myNetDiary: seemingly equivalent features, but was super stuttery on Android - like 20fps just scrolling and interacting. It also didn't feel native at all
- Transit: the app was extremely glitch when trying to scroll. Seizure inducing.
- Wire guard supports on demand tunnel on iOS and macOS. No such option on Android. Inconceivable.
- If you want a polished experience, you have to install the Pixel/Google equivalents of apps, and it is hard to use them in ways that aren't associated with your Google account. The built-in messages app is horrible so you need to install Google Messages. If you're logged into Play you're logged into Google Messages; no choice in the matter. If you want a good camera you need to install Pixel camera, and they leverage that to lock you into Google Photos. iOS is no better, but the trade off with Android is less polish for more choice, not less polish for the same strong arm lock in tactics.
- the OS hijack navigation in ways that are horrible for day to day browsing. In particular, there are no forward gestures because android insists on making swipe left from the right edge go back. I was told android is customizable but there is no option here. Consequence: no draggable scrollbar, no forward navigation in browsers.
- the built-in calendar (Google calendar) doesn't support drag and drop for adjusting event times. It made the calendar app excruciating to use - everything takes many more taps than iOS. Also, no support for CalDAV and CardDAV out of the box means Android is a bad choice if you self host. I tried DAVx5 but found it unreliable.
- Google Calendar won't show local calendar entries on open until you navigate to a different app then go back.
- The back gesture works differently more or less at random. Sometimes an app screen is part of the navigation stack, sometimes it isn't. Because android apps assume you will have a back button, they don't provide any back option, but it is always ambiguous what back will do - close the keyboard, close the app, close the menu, navigate back within the app. On iOS the options are different but more clearly presented and overall far more consistent than android.
- copy and paste is less consistent than iOS. Sometimes it for some reason makes me do a detour through a full screen text editor. Not really sure why.
- app design is inconsistent - a mix of pre-material, material 1, and material 3/you.
- doesn't have basic features I've come to rely on. Like on iOS I can make an app require biometrics to open. No such option with stock android launcher. Similarly, basic android doesn't seem to have the photo slides how option for backgrounds, which I love on my iPhone.
- Android has poor support for RCS. RCS just worked on my iPhone, but it failed to set up after a day of trying on the Pixel.
- Health Connect does a bad job deduplicating data. On iOS my watch, phone, earphones, etc all contribute data. IOS can handle this without eg double counting steps. Health Connect cannot. There are also fewer options for visualizing the data, since Health Connect is very new, whereas HealthKit is well over a decade old.
There are parts of android that are polished. I think the basic launcher experience is overall better if you turn off the Google Now stuff. I like that the animations are faster. Material You, although underrealized, looks great where it is implemented, far better than liquid glass.
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Clearly an AI bot posting slop. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46753519 being another example.
I wonder if there’s known ideas on how to protect the quality of discourse on here from this type of intrusion :<
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I run both, Tahoe on laptop, Sequoia on mac studio. Tahoe is strictly worse, the corner radius drag issue is driving me crazy on the daily.
There’s a command to make the corner bigger.
defaults write -g AppleEdgeResizeExteriorSize 8+1 exact same situation.
having Tahoe on my MacBook made me appreciate Sequoia on my mac Studio. A real downgrade..
It actively ruins multimedia software I use in live performances- so no I don’t just need to upgrade