Latest version
macOS 26.0 Beta
(25A5279m)
Apple Security Releases
macOS 26 Release Notes
macOS 26 Official Site
macOS 26 Press Release
Design
- New design Liquid Glass.
- Final release for Intel Macs. link
- New icons for all apps. link
- Icons that didn't adhere to the square shape are now automatically wrapped in a square icon. link
- New transparent menu bar.
- New Control Center that's now customizable even with apps on your iPhone. link
- New sidebars and toolbars.
- New cursor design. link
- New welcome screen. link
- Touch Bar redesign. link
- Launchpad is gone and replaced by Apps. link
- New Finder icon with reversed color layout.
- Irregular shaped icons get a background shape. link
- Web-app icons don't get the Liquid Glass treatment as of the first beta.
- Menus now can optionally feature icons.
- Menu bar can be set to opaque/translucent with reduce transparency.
- Third-party menu bar items can now be removed.
- Folder colours pick up the colours of previously tags, and works in tandem with this functionality (as expected)
- Modal dialogues are now left-aligned. link
- Links to Web-apps now correctly opens in your Web-app instead of in the default browser.
- Set the clock appearance on screensaver and lockscreen in the Wallpaper settings.
- New volume and brightness indicators. link
- macOS now notifies you with a new popup when apps attempt to run a daemon after they have been closed. You can "Always Allow" the background process to run or you can deny it permission.
- You can now change the style of the Lock Screen clock. link
- New wallpaper Tahoe. link
Apple Intelligence
- New icon for Siri.
- New icon for Apple Intelligence.
- Apple Intelligence now integrates more into apps.
- New languages including Vietnamese.
- Live Translations for Messages, FaceTime and Phone.
- Shortcuts integration of Apple Intelligence.
- Image Playgrounds add the ChatGPT styles, including realistic.
- Emoji support for Image Playground.
- More control for images of friends and gamily with Genmoji.
Spotlight
- Spotlight can now search clipboard history, including items from Universal Clipboard.
- Clipboard history not present in beta 1?
- Items from the menu bar for the app a user is currently working in are searchable in Spotlight.
- You can assign Quick Keys to individual actions, allowing you to add a reminder by typing "ar" into Spotlight, for example. Not yet in beta 1?
- Suggested apps listed in Spotlight include iPhone apps, which are opened with iPhone Mirroring. Spotlight can also now search through an active app's menu bar items.
iPhone Mirroring
- New icon.
- Live activities are now mirrored from iPhone in the menu bar and will open iPhone Mirroring when clicked.
Phone
- New Phone app. link
- Support for Call Screening and Hold Assist.
Journal
- New Journal app.
Games
- New Games app consolidates your gaming library, Apple Arcade, lets you play with friends and lets even single player games have challenges and leaderboards.
- Not compatible with Steam.
- The new Game app comes with Game Overlay that appears onscreen while you play and offers social features like friend invites and chat, along with quick access to system settings.
- A new Game Controllers settings menu lets you remap and customize PlayStation controllers, right down to the level of haptic feedback and even the light bar color.
Messages
- New icon for Messages.
- Supports all the new features from iOS.
Passwords
- New icon.
- Passwords app now maintains a change history for password entries.
Safari
- New Safari icon.
- Unified Safari URL Bar – Safari no longer offers the option to unify the tab bar and the address bar (the Compact tab layout setting), perhaps because it wasn't popular with users. Apple could always reinstate it in a later beta version.
- Safari now has a transparent address bar, and colours from webpages shine through the browser's main toolbar.
- Safari changes to dark mode when a site is dark. link
Calculator
- Does not have button states
Calendar
QuickTime
- New icon.
- New design. link
Preview
- New icon.
Photos
- New icon.
- New app redesign.
Weather
- Weather demonstrates why the sidebar is floating. It seems they designed it with textured/coloured content first. It just looks weird and out of place on single colour windows, like in the Finder
Notes
- New icon.
- Lets you capture conversations in the Phone app as audio recordings with transcriptions.
- Lets you export a note into a Markdown file.
Accesibility
- New Magnifier app.
- New Vehicle Motion Cues.
Developers
- New Accessibility section added to the App Store product pages.
- New Foundation Models framework with direct access to the on-device LLMs at the core of Apple Intelligence.
- For Catalyst apps built with the latest SDK, UINavigationItem.title is now the window title.
- For Catalyst apps built with the latest SDK, UIBarButtonSystemItem.fixedSpace and .flexibleSpace are now bridged to NSToolbar. The system no longer ignores fixed and flexible spaces when UIBarButtonItems are automatically converted to the window toolbar in the Mac idiom. However, the width specified via fixedSpaceItem(ofWidth: ) is ignored.
- macOS now supports the Apple Sparse Image Format (ASIF). See VZDiskImageStorageDeviceAttachment.
- Interpolating non-localized types into a LocalizedStringResource/String(localized: )/AttributedString(localized: ) value will now display a deprecation warning instead of potentially falling back to a fully-unlocalized string.
- ISO8601FormatStyle now allows fractional seconds, regardless of the setting of includingFractionalSeconds.
- ISO8601FormatStyle now allows hours-only time zone offsets.
- For supported game controllers, pressing the Home button once opens the Game Overlay. Set preferredSystemGestureState to receive additional Home button press events.
- In the “ABC – India” keyboard layout, the ₹ (rupee) symbol has replaced the ` (back tick) symbol.
- Metal 4 is now supported. See Metal.
- Dynamic string data in format arguments for NSLog will be redacted to \<private\> in the Unified Logging System. This specifically targets data that enters the Unified Logging System via NSLog, and will not impact the Xcode console or NSLog’s stdout output.
- NSTextView supports sound files, such as QuickTime Audio, attached via NSTextAttachment, by utilizing AVPlayer for playback inline.
- There is a new option for the Transaction.Offer.PaymentMode API called oneTime. This new case supports the method of payment for In-App Purchase offer codes.
- Subscription promotional offers can now be signed using JWS and attached to a purchase using the new PurchaseOption.promotionalOffer(_:compactJWS: ) API. There are also new corresponding SwiftUI APIs in StoreKit to attach a signed promotional offer or a signed introductory offer override to a view.
- An animated SwiftUI.Transaction that changes a Window‘s size animates the window’s frame, alongside the frame of the hosting view.
- You can now use View/findNavigator(isPresented: ), View/findDisabled(_: ), and View/replaceDisabled(_: ) to control the presentation of the Find Bar in TextEditor on macOS 26.
- ControlSize now conforms to Comparable, and View/controlSize(_: ) can now be used to clamp the environment’s controlSize to a given range.
- In apps built with the macOS 26 SDK, Section footers within a Form of the GroupedFormStyle now have leading alignment, default font, and foreground styles. Use the sectionActions(content: ) view modifier on your Section to supply section actions, which maintain a trailing placement in macOS.
- Text, TextEditor, and TextField now by default use string contents to determine the appropriate base writing direction for each paragraph, instead of relying on layout directionality. To specify the writing direction explicitly on a per-paragraph basis, use Foundation’s AttributedString.writingDirection attribute. To make the base writing direction follow the layout direction for an entire view, apply the view modifier .writingDirection(strategy: .layoutBased).
- In apps built with the macOS 26 SDKs, a Picker view of a style that produces a button-like control now has a fitted sizing behavior by default. If needed, use the buttonSizing(_: ) view modifier to make the Picker flexible and fill the available width of its container.
- The default label style for macOS menu content is now .titleAndIcon.
- The implementation of some macOS buttons no longer uses NSButton.
- When linking news SDKs, NavigationLinks produce a single view, rather than a list of views in view list contexts. This change improves performance of many NavigationLinks in lazy containers like List. However, if you are relying on ContainerValues propagating out of the label view of a NavigationLink, or similarly relying on ContainerValues of a ButtonStyle used to style a link, the containerValue(_: ,_: ) modifier should be moved outside of the link.
- List no longer ignores the vertical insets of rows with a height close to the default minimum height on iOS and visionOS. Use listRowInsets(_: _: ) to change the vertical row insets.
- In NavigationSplitView and TabViews configured as sidebarAdaptable, the view trailing the sidebar’s safe area is inset in the width of the sidebar. It can display content outside its safe area, underneath the sidebar.
- A Form of the .grouped style now has a more compact appearance when placed within a sidebar or inspector.
- Reuse existing AppKit gesture recognizers in SwiftUI using NSGestureRecognizerRepresentable, and refer to them by name using name.
- After linking new SDKs, the style of search fields with SearchFieldPlacement.sidebar is now fixed to the toolbar. Previously the search field would scroll as the first element in the list.
- In apps that adopt the new design, the buttonBorderShape(_: ) view modifier can be used to customize the shape of bordered buttons. Previously this modifier only affected buttons in Widgets in macOS.
- The buttonSizing(_: ) view modifier specifies the sizing behavior of Button, Picker, Menu, and other button-producing controls. If you are using Spacer views or an infinite-width frame in your Button label to create a flexible button, apply buttonSizing(.flexible) to the Button instead.
- In macOS apps that adopt the new design, buttons of the .bordered style can be tinted with the tint(_: ) view modifier.
- A new property, includesTextListMarkers, is introduced to NSTextList, NSTextContentStorage, and NSWritingToolsCoordinator. This property controls whether to include the text list marker string in the contents of NSAttributedString for paragraphs associated with NSTextList. TextKit 1 expects the marker string, while TextKit 2 does not. AppKit is adopting the TextKit 2 text list behavior starting with macOS 26.
- In TextKit 2, the includesTextListMarkers property has been introduced to NSTextList, NSTextContentStorage and NSWritingToolsCoordinator. For paragraphs associated with NSTextList, the property controls whether to include the text list marker string in the NSAttributedString contents. The classes within TextKit 1 expect the marker string, while the classes within TextKit 2 do not.
All the little things and changes here and there, changes from Tahoe, and more — post them here! Let's keep this fun and positive! This is not a thread for bugs and troubleshooting, please keep it to new discoveries only. This post is editable.
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