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Damn. This is a mess. Aren't your contacts on the phone and your mac supposed to be synced and contain the same info? They don't. At least as far as my main personal contact is concerned. What I'm seeing:

On my phone, there are some 5 or more extra phone numbers associated with my contact, that aren't mine, and when I click the edit button they aren't there to delete. perhaps these got added from phone spoofing or something, I don't know, but I can't delete them.

On my mac, my main contact doesn't have these numbers. Where's the sync feature? I recently moved, so I changed my address, but it's still showing my old address as home, my new address as other, but when I click edit, the old address doesn't show up so it can't be removed.
Same for me but with a couple of extra emails, they appear only in the info, not in the editing panel.

Regarding the sync: my experience is that contacts between iPhone and Mac do eventually sync, but it takes some time.
Also, editing the info of an unknown number, or associating it to an existing contact, is not immediate between Phone app and Contacts. And again, it takes time to be synced between iPhone and Mac.
But all appears quite confusing and unreliable.

Fine, I'll create a new contact for myself, but when I try to do that, it quits about 10 seconds in, everything just gone.

Hopefully some attention will be paid to this for before the next version.
My impression is that the iPhone's app is slightly better, more predictable. But even if that's the case, it doesn't justify the sloppy behaviour of the Mac's Contacts.
 
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Regarding the sync: my experience is that contacts between iPhone and Mac do eventually sync, but it takes some time.

re: "it takes some time"
Are you referring to the time it takes

From: When I backup and Sync my iPhone when connected to Finder on the MBP. In the "info" tab, using the option to sync all contacts to the MBP

To: When that contact will show up in Contacts on my MBP?

OR (actually probably you mean...) the time it takes if you are syncing contacts via iCloud
so
iPhone Contacts app change made--> iCloud --> MacOS Contacts change appears

1759430139038.png
 
re: "it takes some time"
Are you referring to the time it takes

From: When I backup and Sync my iPhone when connected to Finder on the MBP. In the "info" tab, using the option to sync all contacts to the MBP

To: When that contact will show up in Contacts on my MBP?
I'm not sure what this means. I don't manually connect the iPhone to the Mac and I don't know where to find that panel in your screenshot.

OR (actually probably you mean...) the time it takes if you are syncing contacts via iCloud
so
iPhone Contacts app change made--> iCloud --> MacOS Contacts change appears
Yes, I mean automatically, via iCloud.
 
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Ah, thanks. I can’t (security reasons) use the cloud path to get my contacts to my MBP. I use a thunderbolt 3 cable and Finder sync.
 
I"ve had issues with Contacts for years, and I'm still on Sequoia. Adding Contacts to Lists is always trouble now... might be able to add two or three, then I must quit and restart Contacts to add more.

I rebuilt the Contacts database by starting from scratch form a VCard Export. Brought down my library size substantially, but the problems persist.

I sent a note to Apple at the Contacts Suggestion site.
 
I'm having the same problem with MacOS Tahoe not displaying my contact details properly. I have to hit EDIT to see it all and in the right order. WTH is going on, does anyonew have a fix for this?
 
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I'm having the same problem with MacOS Tahoe not displaying my contact details properly. I have to hit EDIT to see it all and in the right order. WTH is going on, does anyonew have a fix for this?
Unfortunately, no.

Just tried again.

In my case, my card showed a couple of emails that I don't use anymore and if I clicked Edit to remove them, they were not there. Then I clicked Done and they were still there.

I have quit Contacts and reopened it. Magically... my card doesn't contain those emails anymore.

If you have an iPhone, I recommend trying to edit the details in the iPhone's app, but not when Contacts is running on the Mac. Then save, close and open again.
 
Unfortunately, no.

Just tried again.

In my case, my card showed a couple of emails that I don't use anymore and if I clicked Edit to remove them, they were not there. Then I clicked Done and they were still there.

I have quit Contacts and reopened it. Magically... my card doesn't contain those emails anymore.

If you have an iPhone, I recommend trying to edit the details in the iPhone's app, but not when Contacts is running on the Mac. Then save, close and open again.


Thanks, just tried. No luck :-/
 
I tried using cardhop, but it wouldn’t let me edit my contacts. Does anybody have simple alternatives, or are we stuck?

Edit: using Fastmail with CardDAV.

odd - I can edit via cardhop
try their subreddit - I have seen Cardhop support personally answer
 
Same for me but with a couple of extra emails, they appear only in the info, not in the editing panel.

Regarding the sync: my experience is that contacts between iPhone and Mac do eventually sync, but it takes some time.
Also, editing the info of an unknown number, or associating it to an existing contact, is not immediate between Phone app and Contacts. And again, it takes time to be synced between iPhone and Mac.
But all appears quite confusing and unreliable.


My impression is that the iPhone's app is slightly better, more predictable. But even if that's the case, it doesn't justify the sloppy behaviour of the Mac's Contacts.
To clarify - on my mac: I have several extra email addresses, and an old mailing address in my personal card, that do not show up in edit mode. On my iphone: I have several extra unknown phone numbers (that don't show up on my mac), in addition to the stuff from the mac, that do not show up in edit mode. On my ipad - has the same info as the phone, same issue with edit mode.

If I delete my card on all devices, and then start a new one, as soon as I enter either my phone number or my main email address it propagates everything back in immediately, and it's back on all devices as it was before, still with the uneditable incorrect info, and stuff that's on one device but not the others.

I spent some quality time with the apple chat support person last weekend - he suggested a number of things to try, none of which fixed anything. Wanted to escalate it to higher up on the support chain, but I was running out of time and patience. I just completely deleted my personal card for now, will wait until 26.1 or whatever and try it again.
 
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To clarify - on my mac: I have several extra email addresses, and an old mailing address in my personal card, that do not show up in edit mode. On my iphone: I have several extra unknown phone numbers (that don't show up on my mac), in addition to the stuff from the mac, that do not show up in edit mode. On my ipad - has the same info as the phone, same issue with edit mode.

If I delete my card on all devices, and then start a new one, as soon as I enter either my phone number or my main email address it propagates everything back in immediately, and it's back on all devices as it was before, still with the uneditable incorrect info, and stuff that's on one device but not the others.

I spent some quality time with the apple chat support person last weekend - he suggested a number of things to try, none of which fixed anything. Wanted to escalate it to higher up on the support chain, but I was running out of time and patience. I just completely deleted my personal card for now, will wait until 26.1 or whatever and try it again.
Clearly there are multiple issues both in the user interface and in the cross-device sync mechanism via iCloud.
 
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Apologies if this repeats anything but I have been trying to wrestle my contacts on iOS 26. I haven’t upgraded my M4 MBA because I’ve been so appalled by iOS26. Contacts is a huge buggy mess but this is what I’ve done to try and regain control:

1. On a Mac export your complete contacts as a vCard.

2. Import into your Google account (or set one up). I have reservations about letting Google have my contacts but having them in a proprietary format is on balance worse.

3. Re-export from Google as a CSV file ‘for Outlook’. This strips out all previous photos and posters.

4. Wipe Google contacts and re-import the CSV. Use Google’s excellent tools to find and merge duplicates.

5. Add your Google account to iOS and in Settings turn off contacts in iCloud and turn on contacts in your Google account.

6. Use a stable iOS client like Cardhop. You may need to go back to Contacts to sort out contact thumbnails and poster colours. but at least everything has been cleaned up. I haven’t investigated Cardhop for MacOS because as I said, I haven’t dared upgrade to Tahoe yet.
 
I have to shoehorn this in, because either I'm hallucinating alone, or I can't be alone in finding this nonsense irritating - why am I being prompted to create a contact when copying text from pdfs in Preview? if your selection contains numbers, there's a dropdown menu and the text goes yellow when you click it, and there's a whole form to fill in - I don't even use contacts so wtf is this, they must have thought 'well, let's just stuff random functions anywhere, so if you need a number to call, you can now find them everywhere!', enter this useless eyesore - where am I supposed to disable it?
 
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It gets even worse.

Just found a problem with the Notes section of contacts.

It doesn't start displaying from the top. So it cuts off the first line or two. Which of course, are the most important notes I have under each contact. For instance, my account number for frequent flyer programs or hotels.

So not only does it make you hover over the contact with all the wasted space for the non existent picture. And then my earlier complaint where you have to scroll down to see information. Then you don't actually see that information because it's hidden. You have to click on the notes area. And then you still can't scroll up with the touchpad because that will just scroll you back up to the other part of the contact. You have to use the arrow keys as though you want to edit something in notes!

I did try to add a few blank lines to move the information down and of course, the notes helpfully ignores those black lines and reverts to hiding the first few lines of actual information.

This is insanity!
 
This not a benefit when it's a usability drawback like this.
Different devices on different OS platforms do not need to all look identical.

The Mac is its own thing, and software should reflect the strengths of that.

In the same way, it's ridiculous how they are adding all this padding to the entire UI, which just nukes effective usable screen space.
Your argument has been lost inside Apple. That side died with Catalyst and Apple Silicon with native iOS apps on macOS
 
It gets even worse.

Just found a problem with the Notes section of contacts.

It doesn't start displaying from the top. So it cuts off the first line or two. Which of course, are the most important notes I have under each contact. For instance, my account number for frequent flyer programs or hotels.

So not only does it make you hover over the contact with all the wasted space for the non existent picture. And then my earlier complaint where you have to scroll down to see information. Then you don't actually see that information because it's hidden. You have to click on the notes area. And then you still can't scroll up with the touchpad because that will just scroll you back up to the other part of the contact. You have to use the arrow keys as though you want to edit something in notes!

I did try to add a few blank lines to move the information down and of course, the notes helpfully ignores those black lines and reverts to hiding the first few lines of actual information.

This is insanity!
As I said before, it looks as if it’s never gone through a basic quality test. I can’t believe that the developers themselves could deem it good enough. It smells like an order from higher ranks was issued to cut corners and deliver with a hard deadline.
 
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It gets even worse.

Just found a problem with the Notes section of contacts.

It doesn't start displaying from the top. So it cuts off the first line or two. Which of course, are the most important notes I have under each contact. For instance, my account number for frequent flyer programs or hotels.

So not only does it make you hover over the contact with all the wasted space for the non existent picture. And then my earlier complaint where you have to scroll down to see information. Then you don't actually see that information because it's hidden. You have to click on the notes area. And then you still can't scroll up with the touchpad because that will just scroll you back up to the other part of the contact. You have to use the arrow keys as though you want to edit something in notes!

I did try to add a few blank lines to move the information down and of course, the notes helpfully ignores those black lines and reverts to hiding the first few lines of actual information.

This is insanity!
Have you reported to Apple?
 
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picking a colour from the photo to use as the background frequently picks a rather ugly colour, and can pick colours with a terrible contrast - it would have been considerably less of a bad idea to let you pick a separate poster, or set the background to plain window colour, even if they don't want to do that by default.

The misfeature I came here to moan about (after submitting feedback) is that you can't drag and drop or paste an image into the card anymore - I assume that's intentional, as the Sonoma documentation (and all the way back to Mojave) said you could do that but they've removed that "tip" from the Tahoe documentation.

why am I being prompted to create a contact when copying text from pdfs in Preview? if your selection contains numbers, there's a dropdown menu and the text goes yellow when you click it, and there's a whole form to fill in
It appears to think any moderate-length string of numbers, spaces, plus signs, dashes, and brackets is a phone number. I assume they're trying to recognise all the world's phone numbers with a regex or something like that.
 
It appears to think any moderate-length string of numbers, spaces, plus signs, dashes, and brackets is a phone number. I assume they're trying to recognise all the world's phone numbers with a regex or something like that.

It's very irritating. If I have a string of numbers in a note within a Calendar event, it assumes it's a phone number and adds it to the event as a location. Accidentally clicking on it attempts to start a phone call. It can't be removed.

A string of numbers in the Notes app (such as a booking reference number) also gets highlighted as a phone number and does the same thing as above if you click on it.

Apple's "intelligence" here is useless. It's basically guesswork based on simple rules, as you say.
 
Has anyone else noticed the ‘First’ and ‘Last’ names do not display if ‘Company’ is toggled?

Example:
First: John
Last: Smith
Company: Smith’s Plumbers

Instead (with Company toggled) you see “Smith’s Plumbing” where you would expect to see “John Smith”. So, you see “Smith’s Plumbing” twice on the contact!
However, searches for First and Last name still work though.

If you un-toggle ‘Company’ you will see both First and Last name and Company when you exit Edit mode.

This as very poor software testing from Apple.
 
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