The upgrade to macOS 26 doesn’t begin with a bang but with a sigh. It’s a 5-gigabyte download, about half an hour if you’re on fiber, followed by another 20 minutes of installation. And then comes the déjà vu: the system restarts itself. Once. Then again. Then again. Apple never bothers to explain what it’s doing during these black-screen pauses, and for the average user it feels less like progress and more like holding your breath during turbulence. For a company that once mocked the length of Windows updates, this now looks suspiciously similar.
Once you finally land on the desktop, things get interesting. On the bright side, macOS 26 is fast. Really fast. Applications open with a snap, windows glide into place, and the whole experience is as fluid as Linux Mint on a clean machine. But the shine doesn’t last long before the iPadification creeps in. System Preferences, once a hallmark of Apple’s elegance, now resemble a maze of toggles, sub-menus, and rearranged settings that feel imported straight from iOS. If you’ve ever tried to find a setting on an iPad and given up halfway through, you’ll recognize the sensation.
Then there are Apple’s silent design decisions. Disk encryption, for example, now activates itself by default. Security experts may applaud, but for anyone with a finicky SSD, it’s a recipe for panic. We disabled it quickly enough, but not every user will know how—or even that it happened. Meanwhile, the familiar “Macintosh HD” icon, once a fixture at the top-right of the desktop, has vanished. Accessing your drive now requires a detour through the Dock and Finder, as if Apple decided that muscle memory was an outdated concept. Choice, apparently, is no longer on the menu.
The cosmetic upgrades land somewhere between thoughtful and frivolous. Dragging a file into a folder now triggers a glossy little animation. More substantively, folders can finally be colorized—yes, fully, not just their labels. This is one of those changes that makes you wonder why it took Apple a decade to deliver. The Dock, too, has gained customization options, though once again you’ll have to spelunk through the increasingly Byzantine Preferences to find them. Transparency looks nice, responsiveness feels sharper, and—stop me if you’ve heard this before—the Trash icon has changed again.
Much of what’s billed as “new” is really a parade of iPhone-style flourishes. If you came for groundbreaking desktop features, you may leave underwhelmed. But professionals will notice the real gains: faster rendering in video and audio workflows, a lighter system footprint, and dramatically improved handling of massive print jobs. For designers and producers, those invisible improvements matter far more than any animated folder.
Networking, sadly, remains Apple’s weakest link. In its zeal to secure every last packet, macOS has turned file sharing into a riddle wrapped in a password prompt. Even machines running the same version often refuse to recognize one another without a fight. Throw different versions into the mix, and you’ll wish you’d just emailed yourself the file instead.
So should you upgrade? That depends. If you rely on your Mac for heavy lifting—audio, video, publishing—you’ll likely appreciate the speed boosts. For casual users, it may be wiser to wait for the inevitable bug-fix update. And about that version jump—from 15 straight to 26—Apple insists on syncing macOS numbering with iOS and iPadOS. But the symbolism is hard to ignore: the Mac is inching closer to its mobile cousins with every release.
The problem is, a computer is not a phone. It requires flexibility, transparency, and respect for how people actually work. Until Apple rediscovers that, macOS will keep getting sleeker, faster, and—ironically—just a little less Mac-like
By Thierry De Clemensat
Member, Jazz Journalists Association
Editor-in-Chief, Bayou Blue Radio
U.S. Correspondent – Paris-Move / ABS Magazine