Apple's OS26
I updated to Apple’s OS26 on launch day across all my devices: iMac, iPhone and iPad. I was actually planning to wait a while for my iMac because I’d read so much about how Tahoe wasn’t quite ready for primetime, but I got impatient and went for it, and honestly, I think it’s been pretty great. I have yet to encounter showstopping bugs. Everything is smooth. Liquid Glass gets a lot of flak and I think some of it is fair (particularly around accessibility concerns), but personally speaking, I like it. I like the glassy surfaces and rounded corners, I like the Safari redesign a lot. I always switch back to Safari for a bit after an OS update to see if it’s evolved enough to become my main browser, and while I still don’t feel it can replace Firefox for me, this is the longest run I’ve had with Safari for a while.
On my phone, I particularly like the new clear icons. I generally try to make my phone as functionally boring as possible (default or mono-coloured wallpapers, very few icons on the home screen), and the clear icons are a winner in that department. They make the phone screen look super nice and clean while at the same time making it much less distracting since there is less colour to grab your attention. It took me a day or so to get used to them, but now the coloured icons on my iPad look really distracting to me. I haven’t changed them out there because I don’t have as much of a need to make my iPad look boring, and the colour does help me to quickly differentiate apps, but I might just end up changing them as my eyes get used to the clear icons.
My very minimal homescreen. Wallpapers are from Basic Apple Guy, colour-coded for context. This brown is my work colour. Personal is green, DND is blue.
For Obsidian users in the Apple ecosystem, if you’ve upgraded to OS26, I particularly recommend the Cupertino theme. It fits right in with the look and feel of the new OS and makes your Obsidian look as close to native as I’ve ever seen it. Other apps I use often that look really good with Tahoe are Drafts, Forklift (which I use as a Finder replacement) and Unread (my RSS reader).
A tangent only loosely related to OS26: my iMac screen has a recurring issue with flickering black lines at the bottom of the display. This had happened to me before, and fairly recently too, which makes the recurrence all the more aggravating—in January 2024 these lines appeared and took up half my screen, rendering it unusable, so I brought it back to Apple and had to pay a frankly ludicrous amount to get it fixed (being without Applecare). When these new lines manifested I half-hoped that an upgrade to Tahoe would help, but it didn’t. I’m pretty sure they’re a hardware problem since that was the case the first time, and an internet search tells me this is a known problem with iMacs of this generation. Thankfully they’re right at the bottom of the screen so I’m not bothered by them since my eyeline is rarely there, but having been an iMac user for over ten years, this has now convinced me to go the Mac mini + external monitor route for next time because having my display and computer baked into one device is a pain. It would be so much cheaper for me to just replace my monitor or get it fixed than replace the whole iMac, but alas this isn’t an option. My 2021 iMac still runs fine and I am loath to replace it for now since the problem is not showstopping, but next time, I’ll definitely be decoupling my devices.