Apple’s macOS Tahoe was one of the most controversial and controversial Mac updates ever. After almost a year of use, even including Apple Intelligence, some of its touted benefits didn’t pan out.
Maybe it’s always like that. For example, when macOS Big Sur was announced, it was a huge change for the Mac, but now you don’t even remember what was so new about it.
With macOS Tahoe, you know that the main novelty is the liquid glass redesign. It seems like there are more critics of the design than supporters, but that’s probably more because most users don’t care about comments.
That means they have no reason to worry. The menu, which was so different to begin with, has been toned down enough that many people may not have noticed.
There is an option to make all Dock icons transparent, but if you don’t know they’re there and then go looking for them, you won’t find that setting. If you find it, you’ll find it again very quickly because you’ll realize that transparent app icons are a bad idea.
macOS Tahoe Review: From Great to Excellent
I had a weird thing where Liquid Glass meant I had to move the window to the left to see what I needed. But not enough to remember examples to recreate.
One thing that particularly appealed to me about Liquid Glass was the idea that it helped you focus on your work, that all the Mac and Dock menus were less distracting. It’s a great idea, and since I’m using an ultra-wide monitor that’s quite narrow and bulky from top to bottom, I expected to use it a lot.
I haven’t used it even once. Now that the menu bar is more back than it used to be, there is no incentive to do so.
You can make Dock icons transparent, and there’s no earthly reason to do so.
Liquid glass is cool on the Mac. I notice it more on the iPhone and iPad, on the Mac I tend not to consciously notice it.
Which means for me, I noticed all the other aspects of macOS Tahoe, the ones that got a lot less attention. AppleInsider covered five new features that, at launch, looked like they could make us radically more productive.
They were:
- Clipboard history
- Spotlight actions and hotkeys
- Apple Intelligence in keyboard shortcuts
- Live activities
- Phone calls
Every one of them is really useful and a very good addition to the Mac, except maybe the phone. This is actually what I was most excited about, to the point where I added call answer and end buttons to my Stream Deck.
But those buttons worked through a Keyboard Maestro macro that looked for a green phone icon to answer or a red one to hang up. And I can sit here and have my iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch ringing and screaming that I have a call, and my Mac Studio doesn’t care.
Phone calls or FaceTime, I don’t know what it is, but both take a while for notifications to appear. So long that practically every time my caller gave up before I could see the button to press.
It should have been my most used feature, but it just isn’t enough.
I could make outgoing calls but then there was always some kind of audio problem. I was never sure that the person I called would hear me.
So to this day, the Phone app launches when I log in on my Mac Studio and I keep exiting it. I need to try again or remove it from the list of login items.
macOS Tahoe Review: History of Clipboard
This phone issue might be messed up somewhere in my Mac Studio, it might work better for you. Similarly, macOS Tahoe’s clipboard history feature may be exactly what you need, but it didn’t prove useful for me.
It would be entirely because I’ve been using 3rd party competitors for at least a decade now, especially Alfred 5.
The new Spotlight Clipboard History is fantastic – as long as you’re not already using one of the many alternatives
Apple’s version is basically just as useful in that it remembers what you copy so you can paste it somewhere later. It doesn’t matter if you copied whatever it was just now or an hour ago, it doesn’t matter if you’ve copied other things since then.
Whatever it is, if you copied it, you can paste it later. Or you can if you do it within eight hours, because Apple will erase that memory after that.
The idea is probably that people work eight hours a day, but if you do more than that, it’s uncomfortable. It’s also only in place because Apple’s clipboard history isn’t as intelligent as it should be about deleting passwords you’ve copied.
Competing apps like Alfred 5 and Raycast are ones that delete the password from the clipboard history after use. And both have limits on how far back you can back something up, but with Alfredo 5, for example, you can set it to remember copied items for up to three months.
Plus, with Alfredo 5, I can copy six different things from five different places and then paste them all in one go somewhere. Clipboard history is so useful that you want to tell everyone about it, especially if they are Windows users.
So Apple making clipboard history a part of macOS Tahoe is undoubtedly great. If you’ve never used it before, if you don’t have it yet, now you have it, and you’ll wonder how you ever did without it.
I just hope the next version of macOS will improve it.
macOS Tahoe Review: Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence
Likewise, I hope the next macOS fixes a bug that is in macOS Tahoe and has been in every release for several years.
I’m a heavy user of tab groups in Safari, which means I can open every tab and website I could ever need with just a few clicks AppleInsider work. Then if I have a meeting of the Finance Committee of the Writers Guild, then with a few clicks I can have all the agenda pages, proposal papers, bills and so on.
Apple has essentially only added one Apple Intelligence action to Shortcuts, but it’s great.
Groups of cards mean you can have everything you need for the task at hand. Very importantly, they also mean that you have nothing else, you only see what you need.
This is a great feature and there is a shortcut that allows you to switch between these groups of cards. So again, I could set the Stream Deck button to take me directly to AppleInsider a group of cards and more for the Writers Guild.
You can do that, you can set a shortcut to do exactly that and it worked exactly once. Every time the proxy fails with an “internal error”.
Fortunately, what works in Shortcuts is the new Apple Intelligence action. This was enough to make me find Apple Intelligence much more useful than I should have been.
I’m a writer, so the writing tools in Apple Intelligence are mostly worthless. I will never force it to rewrite my work to be friendlier or more professional.
There is a way to rewrite your job to make it more menacing, which was briefly fun.
However, using this one shortcut allowance means that over the past year I have:
- Added a transcript shortcut to my dock
- He created a note-taking app that records audio
- If only this notes app also summarized ramblings into specific tasks
- Automatically turning lists like this into HTML
There are quirks, like when you run the same list of steps using the same shortcut, you sometimes get completely wrong results. But still, one new action “Apply Model” in Shortcuts is great.
macOS Tahoe Review: Spotlight Quick Actions
Quick actions in Spotlight are also pretty good. The idea is that you can bring up Spotlight with the Command-Space Bar, then click on the Actions section and choose from a myriad of options.
Countless Mac features are now accessible in Quick Actions
These options include things like setting timers that I use most often. But there’s also the option to write messages or emails and have them sent directly from Spotlight.
That doesn’t sound as great as it actually is. Because it means you can write emails without having to open Mail or Messages, and therefore without seeing everything that’s waiting for you there.
Spotlight then has a Files option for faster document searches, but not particularly faster than just a regular Spotlight search in my opinion. It also has an Apps option that opens up a grid view of the apps your Mac thinks you’re most likely to use next.
The exact same grid now appears when you click Apps in the Dock. This is the feature that replaced the old LaunchPad and is better, although fans of the old way will disagree.
macOS Tahoe Review: Live Activities
Apple brought iPhone-style live activities to the Mac with macOS Tahoe, and I know it’s true, I’ve seen it in action. But only when testing.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t have to track the flights. Or that I will never follow any sports scores.
Or maybe even if it shows when the takeaway curry is due to be delivered, I’m no longer at my Mac when I’m ordering dinner.
I think Live Activity is great on the iPhone, and especially now that Apple Watch workouts are on the way. Also, when I was waiting at the airport, it was live activities that told me my flight was canceled before the departure board.
Still, I know that on the Mac live activities appear in the menu bar, I’ve just never seen them in real life. But again, that’s me and my use cases, it can’t be a criticism of how Apple did it.
macOS Tahoe review: sounds disappointing
Despite saying that I’m not criticizing Live Activity, and despite noting that my issues with the Phone app may just be mine, I still sound negative about macOS Tahoe. Even though I said I’m not against liquid glass.
The thing is, I switched to macOS Tahoe on my Mac Studio so I could write about it during the beta process. I didn’t move my MacBook Pro to it until a few weeks after the final release.
Launchpad is gone, but its replacement is better.
Which means I was forever going back and forth between macOS Tahoe and macOS Sequoia. And I preferred the Tahoe.
I preferred it so much that I had to go check that the previous version was called macOS Sequoia. It seems like a long time ago and your Mac doesn’t seem right when you use it.
But that definitely happens with every new release of macOS. In a short while, the new edition no longer seems like a new toy, it seems like the Mac was always meant to be.
macOS Tahoe Review – Pros
- Liquid Glass refreshes your Mac
- Clipboard history is a benefit, albeit limited
- Apple Intelligence empowers shortcuts
- Live activities are useful in the menu bar
macOS Tahoe Review – Cons
- The phone app feels abandoned: it requires obscure fiddling to even work
- The tab group shortcut action still doesn’t work
- FireWire is gone, but that only applies to some
- All Rival Clipboard History apps are significantly better
macOS Tahoe Rating – 3.5 out of 5
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