macOS 26 Tahoe: The Ars Technica evaluation

Game Overlay

Tahoe’s new Game Overlay does not add options a lot because it teams present gaming-related options to make them extra simply accessible.

The overlay makes itself accessible any time you begin a recreation, both by way of a keyboard shortcut or by clicking the rocketship icon within the menu bar whereas a recreation is working. The default view contains brightness and quantity settings, toggles on your Mac’s vitality mode (for turning on high-performance or low-power mode, after they’re accessible), a toggle for Game Mode, and entry to controller settings whenever you’ve bought one linked.

The second tab within the overlay shows achievements, challenges, and leaderboards for the sport you are taking part in—although provided that they provide Apple’s implementation of these options. Achievements for video games put in from Steam, for instance, aren’t seen. And the final tab is for social options, like seeing your mates record or controlling chat settings (once more, whenever you’re utilizing Apple’s implementation).

More granular notification summaries

I did not assume the Apple Intelligence notification summaries have been very helpful after they launched in iOS 18 and macOS 15 Sequoia final yr, and I do not assume iOS 26 or Tahoe actually adjustments the standard of these summaries in any instantly considerable method. But following an issue earlier this yr the place the summaries botched main info in breaking information tales, Apple turned notification summaries for information apps off fully whereas it labored on fixes.

Those fixes, as we have detailed elsewhere, are extra about warning customers of potential inaccuracies than about stopping these inaccuracies within the first place.

Apple now offers three broad classes of notification summaries: these for information and leisure apps, these for communication and social apps, and people for all other forms of apps. Summaries for every class could be turned on or off independently, and the information and leisure class has a giant purple disclaimer warning customers to “verify information” within the particular person information tales earlier than leaping to conclusions. Summaries are italicized, get a particular icon, and a “summarized by Apple Intelligence” badge, simply to make super-ultra-sure that persons are conscious they are not taking in uncooked information.

Personally, I believe if Apple cannot repair the basis of the issue in a state of affairs like this, then it is best to take the characteristic out of iOS and macOS fully relatively than danger giving even one individual info that is worse or much less correct than the knowledge they already get by being an individual on the Internet in 2025.

As we wrote a couple of months in the past, asking a comparatively small on-device language mannequin to precisely summarize any stack of notifications overlaying a variety of matters throughout a variety of contexts is setting it as much as fail. It does work OK when summarizing one or two notifications, or when summarizing simple texts or emails from a single individual. But for anything, be ready for hit-or-miss accuracy and usefulness.

Relocated quantity and brightness indicators

Tahoe’s new quantity indicator, in its new location.

Andrew Cunningham

Tahoe’s new quantity indicator, in its new location.

Andrew Cunningham

The brightness indicator has the identical styling.

Andrew Cunningham

The brightness indicator has the identical styling.

Andrew Cunningham

Tahoe’s new quantity indicator, in its new location.

Andrew Cunningham

The brightness indicator has the identical styling.

Andrew Cunningham

The pop-ups you see when adjusting the system quantity or display screen brightness have been redesigned and moved. The indicators used to look as massive rounded squares, centered on the decrease half of your main show. The design had modified through the years, however this was the place they’ve appeared all through the 25-year existence of Mac OS X.

Now, each indicators seem within the upper-right nook of the display screen, glassy rectangles that come out from gadgets on the menu bar. They’ll often seem subsequent to the Control Center menu bar merchandise, however the quantity indicator will come out of the Sound icon if it is seen.

New low battery alert

Tahoe tweaks the design of macOS’s low battery alert notification. Slightly circle-shaped meter (in the identical fashion as battery meters in Apple’s Batteries widgets) reveals you in brilliant purple simply how shut your battery is to being drained.

This notification nonetheless reveals up individually from others and cannot be dismissed, although it does not have to be cleared and can go away by itself. It begins firing off when your laptop computer’s battery hits 10 % and continues to go off whenever you drop one other share level from there (it additionally notified me with out the share readout altering, seemingly at random, as if to bother me badly sufficient to plug my pc in additional rapidly).

The notification frequency and the notification thresholds cannot be modified, if this is not one thing you wish to be reminded about or if it is one thing you wish to be reminded about even earlier. But you may probably use the battery degree set off in Shortcuts to customise your Mac’s habits a bit.

Recovery mode adjustments

Tahoe’s model of the macOS Recovery mode will get a brand new look to match the remainder of the OS, however there are a couple of different issues occurring, too.

If you’ve got ever had an issue getting your Mac in addition, or for those who’ve ever simply wished to do a completely recent set up of the working system, you could have run into the Mac’s built-in restoration atmosphere earlier than. On an Apple Silicon Mac, you’ll be able to often entry it by urgent and holding the facility button whenever you begin up your Mac and clicking the Options button to start out up utilizing the hidden restoration quantity relatively than the principle working system quantity.

Tahoe provides a brand new instrument referred to as the Device Recovery Assistant to the restoration atmosphere, accessible from the Utilities menu. This automated instrument “will look for any problems” along with your system quantity “and attempt to resolve them if found.”

Maybe the Recovery Assistant will really clear up your boot issues, and possibly it will not—it does not let you know a lot about what it is doing, past needing to unlock FileVault on my system quantity to test it out. But it is yet another factor to attempt for those who’re having severe issues along with your Mac and you are not able to countenance a clear set up but.

Apple has made a few different tweaks to the restoration atmosphere, past including a Liquid Glass aesthetic. The restoration atmosphere’s built-in net browser is solely referred to as Web Browser, and whereas it is nonetheless based mostly on the identical WebEquipment engine as Safari, it does not have Safari’s branding or its settings (or different options which can be extraneous to a brief restoration atmosphere, like a bookmarks menu). The Terminal window picks up the brand new Clear theme, new SF Mono Terminal typeface, and the brand new default 120-row-by-30-column measurement.

A brand new disk picture format

Not all Mac customers work together with disk photos often, apart from opening them up periodically to put in an app or restore an previous backup. But amongst different issues, disk photos are utilized by Apple’s Virtualization framework, which makes it comparatively easy to run macOS and Linux digital machines on the platform for testing and different issues. But the RAW disk picture format utilized by older macOS variations can include fairly extreme efficiency penalties, even with as we speak’s highly effective chips and quick PCI Express-connected SSDs.

Enter the Apple Sparse Image Format, or ASIF. Apple’s developer documentation says that as a result of ASIF photos’ “intrinsic structure doesn’t depend on the host file system’s capabilities,” they “transfer more efficiently between hosts or disks.” The upshot is that studying information from and writing information to those photos needs to be a bit nearer to your SSD’s native efficiency (Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company has some testing that suggests significant performance improvements in lots of instances, although it’s onerous to make one-to-one comparisons as a result of testing of the older picture codecs was finished on older {hardware}).

The upshot is that disk photos needs to be able to higher efficiency in Tahoe, which is able to particularly profit digital machines that depend on disk photos. This may gain advantage the light-weight virtualization apps like VirtualBuddy and Viable that principally exist to supply a entrance finish for the Virtualization framework, in addition to virtualization apps like Parallels that supply help for Windows.

Quantum-safe encryption help

You don’t have a quantum pc in your desk. No one does, exterior of labs the place this sort of expertise is being examined. But when or in the event that they change into extra broadly used, they’ll render many industry-standard types of encryption comparatively simple to interrupt.