macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess

It’s been a strict improvement on my computers, which isn’t to say that the author isn’t having problems, just that theirs (or mine!) isn’t the universal experience.

And they’ve finally fixed some annoying, long-endured audio bugs: https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2026/09/24/macos-27-fixes-mul...

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…

Yesterday, I tried to fill out a PDF on a MacOS laptop. It was very rough.

I've been a longtime Linux user, but one of the nice things about MacOS is that it comes out of the box with software for common file formats. I remember being a bit happy to skip the step where I search "best pdf editor linux".

This was true in 2022, when I started using MacOS. Around that time, people were complaining about a battery icon that was too skeumorphic or something, which is so trite in comparison to the avalanche of problems today.

But, geeze, it's rough to edit a PDF on MacOS today. The built-in PDF editor has a weird flow to add text (rather than clicking where you want to place the text, you click a button which summons a box with the text "Text" in an arbitrary position on your PDF). You have to click and drag the Text textbox to the position you want it to be in.

Every part of the UI is broken, though. You have to discover this by clicking (all icons, no text), you have to move the textbox by finding the 1px wide click-and-drag target (on a high-DPI display!), and sometimes, the text simply disappears and deletes itself, in a way no amount of cmd+Z (undo) can fix.

It's very frustrating and crazy-making, but the amount of time it took to fill out one page of a PDF precludes me from wanting to take the effort to document it in this way.

So, I very very much appreciate this author for sharing a few of the million papercuts of MacOS. It is really hard to imagine someone being proud of putting this product out.

I don't know, there are definitely some rough edges (particularly with the menu bar for some reason - big rewrite there?), but overall I'm quite happy with Golden Gate. "Buggy mess" is some serious hyperbole.

Of the issues they report:

- The centering bugs seem... not very important.

- The Mac User Guide looks fine to me. Shows "for macOS 27."

- Network app?

- Why are you looking at the Mission Control app icon at 20x zoom? And in any case, doesn't it seem reasonable to simplify the traffic light design to a flat circle for an icon that will be displayed very small 99.9% of the time?

- Firefox bugs are bugs in Firefox. (I also keep experiencing the stuck menu bug, but again, Firefox bug.)

- "You can find references to NeXTSTEP, the ancestor of macOS, in its UI!" No, that's not what that means.

- "I have a folder open in the Dock. If I click on another folder, shouldn't that then open?" Yes, and it does.

- The rest, sure.

Apple is extremely lucky to have users like this who still work tirelessly to find and report these types of problems. They would do well to listen.

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

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...

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?

My understanding is that Apple has this culture of we must ship things by this date no matter what. They really should slow down and make sure things are fully baked before they get out to the final RC.

Golden Gate works pretty well so far for me.

Gee, I wonder why?

Where are the bugs that aren't just annoying UI/UX nitpicks that we can skip to hit the release date?

Golden Gate is one of the first MacOS releases with more of an enterprise focus. There's a lot under the hood that will be massive to support power users, IT admins, and the like. I'd save the complaints for massive failures in networking configuration or permissions management or anything like that, not button alignment.

I’m usually upgrading my Mac OS major version around x.2.2

Anything prior to that is anything goes, in my experience.

This one really bugs me. Could be my setup (have a few Menu-bar utilities). Anyway... I do Finder Searches a lot to find files in the current directory or system-wide using either find by file name or file contains. Get a list of files fine in response. Then close the search, and my Finder window is blank. Have to click to another folder in the Sidebar, then back to my original folder to get the full folder contents to show. All previous OS versions returned back to list all the files.

Also not a bug, but a bad recession ihmo. I always used to have Finder>Show-Hidden-Files option on. Now it is always off, and one must Cmd+Shift+. to show hidden files each time one opens a directory. Why take that option away ??

If anyone has insights about what might be causing my blank "after search" window, and/or a way to make show hidden files the default please advise. Thx, NSC

This is a bad faith article. The feel of a "buggy mess" is different from what the author described. Every OS is going to have bugs. On top of that, I cannot reproduce a lot of these issues. It's clear the OP is using multiple third party utilities to manage things like the menubar. Try turn them off and complaining.

I feel like the author wanted to write a post like one of those about Tahoe (menu bar, corner dragging), but the stuff they wrote about was all very "who cares"?

Golden Gate has reversed many of Tahoe's regressions and further updates will continue to do so.

  > This one just irks me. Show me one oval camera lens anywhere in the world. I'm waiting.

Well, OP, today is the day you learn about anamorphic lenses

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.

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

It's too slow. Safari crashes too often. But the rather bigger mess for me has been iOS 27 (on my 17) – slowness and the battery drain. Goodness, what have I done on my phone thaat made it into a proper before and after scenario. I had to disable my mission corner hot corner it was so broken. It amazes me how a trillion dollar company manages to break their already broken OS even further. I guess the reason is they know it isn't going to matter. The good hint is the hordes of people (even on hn) finding it necessary to post their polite (of course!) and subtle rebuttals in the form of "been using <certain Apple product> for the last <certain period>, couldn't be happier)".

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.

Aren't we supposed to be living in a world of accelerated software abundance because of AI?

Please please can we get a modern Snow Leopard upgrade?

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…

The mis-alignment trope is well established, be it in the corners or at the center, but there are bigger design sins:

- wastefully large "zero KB" text to signal nothing

- poor text legibility due too light of a gray color - if you don't want people to read that text, don't add it! Or hide behind some tooltip or something

- tiny font size with a lot of space wasted, that's bigger than small margins

- the useless brightness of persistent window controls, they are way too common and unimportant, especially for keyboard users that never even click on then

> I know my machine's getting old, but does it really need a second to load in the Profiles menu when I open a new Firefox window?

I don't see how age matters here for such primitive low cost operations, so no, it should be instant on a machine older than yours

> Sometimes the search bar in System Settings simply refuses to work.

This continues to be a very frequently highlighted epic fail across various Apple platforms. I wonder, is there any substantive explanation on why it's so bad for so long?

> Perhaps there's hope yet. Snow Leopard had nearly two years of refinements to achieve the level of polish and stability its name has become synonymous with today.

Not really, it's more like it has years of memory loss leading to a bunch of bugs like in this blog to be forgotten and the marketing tag taken over. So definitely there is hope, just wait a decade...

Reports like this make it sound like there aren't serious flaws and bugs in MacOS. The things he's listing are trivialities.

I started writing a list of UX and software bugs in Mac OS, but honestly, I don't have the energy or time, there are so many. Mac OS has become an absolute travesty of an OS.

I couldn't reproduce the Color Picker bug mentioned at the end.

Just one small thing to add about the Color Picker: I think it's a good example of how native UI apps have changed over the last decade.

The macOS Color Picker is nice. The idea is to have a single color picker for the whole system. It's extensible, so apps can add their own custom pickers (for example, an OKLCH picker), and you can reuse your palettes across applications.

Sounds great! But most of the applications where you might care about those features (customization, sharing your color schemes, etc.) don't work with the native Color Picker: Figma, Adobe apps, all Electron-based apps, and so on. So the Color Picker's features are useless. That component of the system is exactly the same as it was when I got my first Mac in 2007.

There are multiple nice native features that apps don't use; over time, they become forgotten and barely maintained.

I don't know what the solution is, but at some point, I think Apple should take frameworks like Tauri or Electron into account and build integrations for developers who use them. I know the integrations exists (they are the native APIs), and it's the developers' responsibility to use them, but that's not happening, and it ends up affecting the UX.

> Bugs are elsewhere in the system, too. Sometimes the search bar in System Settings simply refuses to work.

Yep, I've run into this and issues where clicking the search results or normal sidebar items in settings do nothing. Even after killing and restarting Settings.

Golden Gate is better than Tahoe IMHO but only slightly. I hope they circle back to the myriad of bugs/UI issues they introduced.

The most glaring regression in macOS 27 for me is random audio popping/crackling in the Spotify client, otherwise it's mostly fine tbh.

It's such an obvious issue that I'm wondering whether I'm the only one experiencing it or whether Apple users just don't use Spotify or whether Spotify simply doesn't test on macOS (and as such I have no idea where even to write a ticket, the macOS Feedback app doesn't even have a category for problems in non-Apple applications).

I’m not in any way aware of how macOS is architected, but aren’t all these inconsistencies (like different app icons, different menu styles, different window corners etc) pointing to bad code design? There should be one shared source of truth for what needs to be consistent.

These problems look to me like the result of writing N implementations of X, rather than 1 common X shared by all the apps.

It still isn't apparent to me why Apple decided to take their otherwise logical and fine UI, and create Liquid Glass. I guess somebody got a nice new title and bonus, though?

Did they fix the bug where the toolbar of applications would either get stuck open or disappear while in full screen mode, requiring them to be moved to the desktop before returned to fullscreen?

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.

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

Opens with a reference to Snow Leopard, I miss it to this day.

I'm honestly very puzzled by all the positive comments I've seen about Golden Gate, it's strictly worse in my experience (i.e., I can't think of any old bugs that don't bother me anymore, but there are annoying new ones). For example, I can report the same menubar bug as the author: as I'm typing this very comment, my Firefox menubar has two menus permanently "selected" [0]. I use the Hiding option for the Dock, but ever since I upgraded the Dock randomly switches into an unhidden state (but it still thinks it's hidden, so I have to disable Hiding and then re-enable it to fix the behavior). I now have to semi-regularly `sudo killall coreaudiod` to fix the audio randomly cutting out on my AirPods (this would occasionally happen before, but it's gotten way more frequent). I'm left very unimpressed with whatever's going on at Apple.

I just checked and 27.0.1 is out, so here's hoping it fixes anything....

[0] https://imgur.com/a/5i5TlzQ

EDIT: Actually, one bug that I haven't noticed on Tahoe is the weird lack of vertical padding that some System Settings screens used to have. Credit where credit's due.

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.

Sequoia was the Snow Leopard of the 2020s. Going from that high to the lows of tahoe or golden gate is a real and jarring downgrade.

It surely is the worst release based on my experience.

* bluetooth keyboard suddenly very laggy * mission control spaces shortcuts

Can't believe they made this glaring oversight.

I've had a random annoying bug where a mysterious window with no controls and no menu bar presence appears on top of all of my apps with seemingly no origin, rhyme, or reason, and I can't do anything to get rid of it except restart. It looks suspiciously like one of the "do you want to allow this accessory to connect" dialog boxes but it doesn't have any text. It's really mystifying.

I hoped this update would've made my Mac more stable from the last release, and while maybe the performance is better, I feel like issues like this do randomly occur.

I’ve been having some weird issues since upgrading that I haven’t been able to pinpoint if it’s the apps or the OS.

New since upgrading:

- In telegram messages get stuck sending and the app has to be force quit - Discord doesn’t pick up audio device changes until the app is restarted - Soundsource has crashed a few times if I change my AirPods out. - Selecting a screenshot area is laggy when dragging the selection box

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.

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

Private deployed instances of Claude models at Apple has been reported written majority of their code. Perhaps these visual bugs are the manifest of Claude's weakness in vision in the past 6-12 months? Admittedly Claude's vision has gotten better this year.

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.

I've noticed some mini AI icon that's sometimes shows up when I select some text on Safari - I've no Siri enabled - and when I click on it nothing happens (when I'm able to click, I need to be fast like Sonic to catch it!!)

The quality of their software has been inversely proportional to earnings for a while now.

iOS 27 is in the same situation: a little bit less annoying than 26 overall but new bugs all over the place. If that is the Tim Cook farewell, it leaves a very bad impression.

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; and by deeper I mean simply not top level categories. 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.

I personally haven’t noticed any serious bugs yet, but I can’t help but notice how jittery the animations have become compared to just two versions before. It doesn’t feel “smooth” anymore even on new hardware.

I hope that with Opus 5.5 they will be able to fix more bugs in the next version of macos, in the meantime I will stay on Sonoma. This is really disappointing since Golden Gate was supposed to be a bugfix update

Upgraded and now audio won't play out of my HDMI monitor. I wouldn't think this would count as a very niche use case, but what do I know.

> When using the Colours window, if you're the sort of person who uses its built-in eyedropper tool to choose a colour from the wheel (rather than simply clicking on it directly), then congratulations: doing that hangs the entire system

I always thought the eyedropper was so you could match color from an existing element. It never occurred to me to use it to use it in order to zoom in on the color wheel. Am I the only one who used it differently?

Only issue I've seen is search doesn't work in Settings.

Edit: 27.0.1 fixed that.

also ios 27. this is the second time Apple Wallet has frozen when I tried to pay at the cashier. It's really embarrassing.

Every time I read one of these types of posts, I never have any idea what the author is talking about.

This, this this the gripe list for macOS 27? I guess I'll add on, then:

They've completely broken every experience around minimized windows:

- App Expose doesn't show minimized windows at all

- Cmd-` iterating doesn't iterate through minimized windows.

- I've had times where Cmd-`-ing to another Terminal yanked it from it's workspace onto my current one.

- It will just stop rendering the Mission Control thumbnails. 90% of the time it just shows empty workspaces

- It seems to be doing some stupid optimization where it blanks out my Firefox window until the workspace switch animation has fully finished. Likely it's part of how they finally removed the janky animations from the past 3 releases. But, COME ON Wayland can run on my 5 year old x86_64-linux laptop with perfect animations with none of this jank and compromise.

- It regularly doesn't change focus from Firefox (on my second workspace) to Firefox Nightly (on my first workspace), when swiping. Or even swiping and clicking. Only if you swipe, move the cursor and then click does focus shift to the open, top app on the workspace.

It's hot f****king garbage. Maybe this is my foot peddle but it breaks every basic way I do window management and use the OS.

Breaking minimized windows. Only Apple could manage that.

The Mac User Guide on the site was updated to Golden Gate on launch day. There were lingering server-side cache issues that would occasionally display the Tahoe version to some users.

These should have been fixed as of a couple weeks now.

Anyone still seeing Tahoe? If so, please reply with the URL you are visiting.

For a laugh, ask Siri AI “how do I contact Apple’s CEO?”

For a cry, ask it how to change the keyboard shortcut for activating Siri in Golden Gate.

This is a usual crap Apple has turned to, other things are so fucked up, so I’d close my eyes on the former. E.g.:

Apple (iCloud) Data Recovery works only if you deleted files from Drive via GUI, which places them in Trash.

So you actually do have them. Whaat? Why would you need a recovery? Good question.

Now it gets really interesting: you’ve emptied the Trash and now wanna to recover some.

But they are no more. Gone. Can’t be recovered anymore.

And there is a reason of course: because fuck you, that’s why.

And it’s documented FYI, so it’s a feature.

Checkmate.

It’s been an improvement for me.

Considering Apple is one of the most profitable companies in history I hold it to a high standard...which it isn't living up to. I find that deeply disappointing. You'd think with the money they're earning they could at least find some talented developers. To me it looks like they're fishing up trash from the gutter and putting them to work on its operating system. Also, it seems they're more interested in visual polish than day-to-day functionality.

This isn't new of course, it's old news. Mac OS X has been buggy since I developed for it more than two decades ago.

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

I haven't noticed any bugs yet. And I actually like Liquid Glass, cranked the transparency to the max. AMA.

I had this naive assumption for years that MacOS was the most stable / workable *nix desktop available, but I’d been sleeping on modern Linux distros.

Been on Mac since the 90s, now a very happy Linux desktop user.

Windows Vista. Is that you?

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.

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

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

Have they fixed getting a name server over VPN?

watchOS 27 broke noise monitoring.

Commonly held lore is that you do not install a macOS with a minor version of zero. That has been confirmed by shoddy first releases ever since there's a macOS X.

Wait for the next upgrade unless you're forced to go with the first release.

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)

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!

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?

Every release of MacOS is a mess. Then it gets slightly better and you find workarounds just in time for the next release. That's just how it has always been.

Not my experience at all. Golden Gate runs smooth as butter with no issues except spotlight being as buns as it's always been.

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

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

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.

happy i've waited

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.

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.

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...

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

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

Just AI it /s

Every year some crybaby have issues. The upgrade experience has been flawless for years without needing a full clean reinstall