In June 2008 Apple announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard, proudly boasting that it would have "no new features". Instead of piling on new things, Snow Leopard aimed to build on the success of its predecessor, Leopard, opting to focus on under-the-hood performance and stability improvements throughout the system.
18 years later, Apple is taking a similar approach with macOS 27. Golden Gate aims to fix the missteps of last year's Tahoe, promising an expansive set of improvements and "a more responsive and delightful experience".
Does it hold up? Here are just some of the bugs I’ve encountered in my daily use over the past couple of weeks.
Alignment is hard
Let's start with some good old alignment bugs. Centring things is the hardest problem in computer science, after all.
Take the QuickTime record button. Hey, at least it's vertically centred.
And here are the window tiling icons. These were centred at some point, I'm sure.
Text is affected, too, but I'm not sure this is even attempting to look centred.
And this is the first thing you see when you open System Settings. A little bit more padding under the heading wouldn't hurt, no?
Things they forgot
Opening the Mac User Guide, I was quite surprised to find that it was for last year's OS. This made me wonder: what else did they forget?
We're bound to find things Apple overlooked poking around the Touch Bar settings. Sure enough, here's Siri's old logo.
The Network app, too, can’t make up its mind whether to use its new icon or not.
And I know I'm nitpicking (I'll indulge myself some more later), but the window controls now have a glossy sheen. Nobody seems to have told the Mission Control app.
Bugs
In this release, Apple changed the architecture of the menu bar, breaking a number of third-party menu bar management apps.
It also introduced several bugs, and even the occasional crash. Let's have a look!
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?
And why does it keep highlighting the File menu for me?
This is a fun one. Try moving the green camera icon. Oops! You've crashed the menu bar.
Bugs are elsewhere in the system, too. Sometimes the search bar in System Settings simply refuses to work.
Not that it's much use when it does function. Here's me trying to move down the search results with the arrow keys.
Also new in this release: links are only clickable for a split second. Miss it and it's gone!
I'm still not sure what this button is actually meant to do. I've been pressing it for over an hour now.
About as much time as I've been waiting for this volume slider to auto-hide itself. It never took this long in the past.
Now onto Mission Control. Here's a fun fact: You can find references to NeXTSTEP, the ancestor of macOS, in its UI! You're not supposed to, mind.
I'm not sure this is supposed to happen, either. Capturing these bugs is hard work when you can’t even trust the tool you’re using to behave properly.
Window sizes can also be miscalculated.
And window controls can disappear altogether.
Tiling has always been a struggle in macOS.
If you want a challenge, try to recreate whatever's going on here. Go on, give it a go.
Nitpicking
I can't in good faith include these as regular bugs. I'd like to think there was a time when you could expect macOS to be obsessively polished, but I recognise no software is perfect, and you have to draw a line somewhere. But if I was promised refinements...
Returning to the Touch Bar, why does this one icon not match the UI on screen?
Another one for you fact fans: try using the screenshot app to capture an app window and you'll discover the only straight corner in the entire OS. Don't tell the Apple design team.
This one just irks me. Show me one oval camera lens anywhere in the world. I'm waiting.
And here, shouldn't there be some sort of visual feedback when I click on this menu item? A hover effect? Anything?
And lastly, something I find unintuitive. I have a folder open in the Dock. If I click on another folder, shouldn't that then open?
Conclusion
Okay, I admit it. Once I started to notice a few, I did purposely go looking for bugs. But not very hard, promise.
And that's the point. In a release where "nothing was off limits, no enhancement too small", it shouldn't be this easy to find bugs in daily use.
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. Maybe the annual release cycle has become a burden, and Golden Gate just needs more time.
If AI has really sped up software development as much as we're told, this shouldn't be a problem.
One final bug
To finish, here's my favourite bug. 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, and you've got no choice but to force a restart.
And rightly so, you freak.