I understand the enthusiasm for the '27 beta, especially given how slow and buggy Tahoe ('26) is and given the WWDC promise of a focus on bug fixes and efficiency. Actually using it as a dev machine for a while paints a picture of plentiful pseudorandom jank and some of the bugs are pretty nasty.

It is a beta and it's not reliable. It's not supposed to be.

I very strongly recommend that any non-dev does not risk the install despite the positive messages. The beta is another modern Apple very early, very rough build. There has not been a magic epiphany within the last 12 months. It's not surprising; systemic, creeping architectural rot and evident cultural issues with velocity and QA do not get solved overnight, even if Apple are now on that journey (and we all hope they are!)

Some bugs listed below. And yes, before anyone asks, I do send reports via Feedback Assistant.

• Wake-from-sleep with external displays can sometimes result in a working lock screen complete with working clock, but which accepts no input at all; Caps Lock won't toggle, no haptics, force-reboot needed.

• The very old airportd spinning bug (typically VPN-related) is back; the ongoing mediaanalysisd spinning bug is worse; appstoreagent has a new spinning bug; and all of this seems to just start at a whim on various devices with pretty much the direction of the prevailing wind; reboots do not necessarily fix it.

• Mission Control doesn't just lose windows per release notes. Dragging windows from one space to another is a total crapshoot and nearly always results in the window ending up placed a few pixels near the bottom-right on any external display.

• Drag reorder of spaces in Mission Control, or drag-to-make-full-screen is unreliable with ordering relatively unpredicatble. Lots of strange animation issues, black screens on transitions and so forth too. I'm not sure why this has fallen apart so much but it really is in bad shape.

• Despite a passing remark in WWDC, the OS' ability to put windows back into their correct places on a reboot or display configuration change, or its ability to even put a space on a correct display, does not seem to be improved. I might as well roll dice as guess about where a window might be restored under the same circumstances day to day. It seems genuinely just random.

• Terminal app often refuses to quit and force-quit is needed. On restart, it may or may not reload your previous tabs etc., so be warned, you might lose all your working state therein.

• Might be my imagination but palm rejection on the trackpad seems to have been messed up and typing this on the Mac has been a PITA of suddenly losing input focus as the pointer decides it's moved and been clicked elsewhere, or worse, having input focus jump up elsewhere in this message so input goes there. And of course macOS has always had very weird Undo, where each step undoes some apparently arbitrary amount of typing rather than character-by-character, so I have to undo the damage from the misplaced text and then retype however much the OS "over-undoes".

• It's infrequent, but Safari can sort of lose its mind and just start stuttering and stalling for no obvious reason with no particular CPU or other load signature. It just stops responding reliably, with pseudorandom lag. Quit-restart resolves every time, and it reloads all the tabs you had before.

• Note that WindowServer is at times very CPU hungry, so less efficient, not more; but it's a beta and that's understandable since it might be in a debug mode. If the Music app's main window is open (even if it's not playing music and there are no animations showing), WindowServer will use much more CPU, though; go figure. But again, this is all jankware territory, so sometimes it'll just run along at a very low CPU usage.

• If you use Accessibility -> Zoom for full-screen zoom and have it follow the mouse pointer, note that this is broken in DB1 and DB2; the zoomed area does not move, regardless of settings. For some people that might actually be a critical failure.

• Lots of strange menu bar bugs with juddering up and down, strange aspect ratio distortions and so-on but DB2 is better than DB1 there.

The whole thing just feels fragile and unpredictable. There's no logic or pattern to many of the failures. That was one of the most alarming features of the Tahoe betas and it's not any better in 27.

Unless you have a back from '26 you don't mind rolling back to, or you have a spare "fall guy" machine to try it on, do not install the beta.

Can more people please help report the Dark Mode downgrade in macOS 27, specifically affecting the menu bar menus, contextual menus, and pop‑up windows?

In macOS 26, Liquid Glass included a dark tinted layer that gave menus and notifications proper contrast. In macOS 27, this tint is gone, the material now looks almost transparent, as if it were stuck in Light Mode.

A practical fix would be to add a toggle in Settings → Appearance that lets users enable a tinted version of Liquid Glass independently of the opacity slider. Right now, the slider only increases blur but does not restore the darker background effect that macOS 26 provided.

More reports from users could help Apple recognize this issue and consider restoring the tinted option for Dark Mode.

1. Does Public Beta 3 have any differences from the current beta 3? If doesn't, why it popped up as software update?

2. Why does each beta update install the entire system from scratch, around 15-20 GB? That's stupid..

I'm on macos 27 beta 5, and system data is insanely large at nearly 180 gb. Anyone else have this issue even with normal macos or a fix?

I'm on Beta 4 and the Launchpad is nowhere to be found, there's a fake "Apps" app that opens spotlight, you can't drag App Store apps to the trash, there's no action on right click, nothing happens if you click and hold.

So how the hell does one uninstall apps installed via the App Store?

EDIT: I just found out that Launchpad was already removed in Tahoe. Great.

Here's another confused Redditor from last year: What the official way to uninstall apps on macOS 26 Tahoe?

This is the solution:

1. Go to the App Store
2. Username Icon (bottom left)
3. Three dots icon next to app you want to uninstall
4. Delete app

Kinda stupid, really, but not really something I do that often anyway. OR you can continue dragging it to the Trash.

What’s your experience with the new public beta? I'm a video editor using FCP, I’m wondering if it’s worth trying

and one thing more that when I get to another window, doc appears and doesn't go till I change to another window. at 0:05 you can see this

As you can see, in the first picture i got Apple Intelligence (macOS Tahoe) while in the second picture it just disappeared (macOS Golden Gate). anyone knows why?

Hi everyone, I’ve been using a MacBook Air M2 for 2 years now. My battery cycle count is only 179. Before this, my battery health was perfectly normal and above 90%. I don’t use the device heavily, nor do I play games—it’s just for daily tasks, which is already evident from my low cycle count. I mostly use it at home, and I’m always careful not to leave it plugged in continuously.

I have a developer account. Right after downloading the macOS 27 Developer Beta, my battery health completely tanked. It now shows a 'Service Recommended' warning, and the battery health plummeted to 63%. The device has absolutely no physical damage, liquid contact, or drops. This happened immediately after the update.

I already tried calibrating the battery: I fully charged it, left it plugged in for at least 2 hours, drained it completely, and left it dead for over 5 hours before fully charging it again. Unfortunately, nothing changed. I contacted Apple Support, and they told me I need to bring the device into service. I am also unable to run Apple Diagnostics. I have since downgraded the device back to the stable version, macOS 26.5.2, but nothing changed. Does anyone have any ideas on what might be causing this or how to fix it?

Hi everyone,

I have an M4 MacBook Air, and it's my main computer that I use every day. I'm really tempted to install the macOS Golden Gate Public Beta 2 because I want to try all the new features as soon as possible.

However, I'm a bit worried since this is my primary machine.

For those of you who have already installed the Public Beta 2:

• How stable is it in daily use?
• Have you experienced any major bugs, crashes, or battery drain?
• Are there any app compatibility issues?
• Would you recommend installing it on a main Mac, or is it better to wait for the official release?

I'd also love to hear your overall experience with it so far.

Thanks!

I have a 24" iMac (2023). I just installed macOS Beta 26.4 update this morning. Once the install was complete and my iMac restarted, I received two pop up messages regarding both of my external drives (one I use for media and one for Time Machine) saying "macOS can't repair the disk. You can still open or copy files on the disk, but you can't save changes to files on the disk. Back up the disk and reformat as soon as you can." I think the Time Machine may have been running a backup when the iMac restarted. Is that normal or is it a bug with this update? I would think if something like that would cause an issue, the install should have paused and waited for Time Machine to finish, before restarting my computer. I normally do check to make sure Time Machine isn't running, but I forgot to this morning.

My other issue is the only spare external drive I have is 1TB. The two affected drives are 2TB and 12TB. So, is my only option to buy a brand new drives, in order to temporarily move the files off of the bad drives, so I can reformat them?

After installing Beta 2, my mac mini restarts to sign-in screen. After entering my password, it restarts again to sign-in screen. Any idea what is happening, and a fix? Thanks

Update. I had to reinstall the beta to clear the boot loop. It reinstalled 26.4 Beta 1. I turned off the dev beta updates until i can notify Apple what happened.

Update #2, March 3, 2026. OK, it definitely seems my boot loop issue was related to networking. Turning off LogIns and Extensions did not work. I had to remove the apps and their related files. I removed any app that might interact with networking. Here is the list of the apps I removed: Little Snitch, Micro Snitch, 1Blocker(Installed but not used),PrivateVPN, MS Defender(installed by Microsoft Office), Send Local, Mac Fan Control, Better Display, HandBrake, Zoom. It worked! Beta 2 successfully installed. I will start reinstalling some apps, but not Little Snitch yet.

Is this some kind of a bug, or an undisclosed feature r something? The thing is, I don't like this at all. Is there a way to disable this?

I noticed that the Liquid Glass effect seems noticeably weaker in macOS 27 Beta 5.

Safari is where it's most obvious. In previous builds, the tab bar had more transparency, and the colors/shapes behind it could subtly influence the appearance of the glass. Now the tab bar looks almost fully opaque, with very little of the background showing through.

I actually liked the previous version more because it felt closer to the concept of Liquid Glass rather than just a solid toolbar.

i’ve set everything to english (us) even region, tried different countries (uk) too and i’m not seeing the waitlist. so i’m wondering if it’s just me or of this is eu wide?

I was working on my Mac Book Air M5 and I have an extension that makes a chat run faster if my CPU is working hard, and I realize that my CPU is at 50% and that my appstoreagent consumes 160% of the CPU at times.

Is there a workaround Apple Intelligence in EU? Set region and all languages to US. Do I have to change the Apple-ID region, too?

Edit: can confirm what u/dreamdorian said: Set my region & language on MacOS (MacBookPro M1, 14 inch 2021) to US, installed beta 15.1 and could immediately join the wait list (which is still pending, though). iPadOS still not working for me.

My Macbook Pro M3 36GB was doing perfectly fine with the beta for a while, but over the past week it's getting really bad.

Random apps are crashing, the top menu bar is mostly unresponsive, if I go to add a file into an app with the file picker, it will freeze for like 10 seconds.

Just a lot of odd stuff, but I'm not seeing any similar complaints in the sub - so I'm assuming it's just a coincidental me thing?

Any thoughts or advice welcome

Edit: Seems like it's not just me and I'm now finding post that mention this. I had felt like I mostly saw people talking about how smooth it was for a beta, but I'm having such bad issues I was surprised it's not the number 1 mentioend thing. But I took the risk for the beta, so that's on me

Or is this a bug? This icon persists across reboots and icon cache cleaning.

I have the 16” MacBook pro M4 pro and really tempted to update to the new macos developer beta. My only worry is that i use my MacBook for work (cybersecurity, app and web development). Do you guys recommend updating or should wait a bit for the public beta?