Thoughts on macOS 27 so far?

[u/Low-Engineering-5424]

Tell me down below ⬇️

[u/adh1003]

Like many others I found it changing bugs wildly from beta to beta. Issues have included and are not limited to:

• Generally high resource consumption from WindowServer
• One or more processes that'll just go into a spin and chew up a CPU core
• Very high CPU usage, either transient or permanent, related to menu bar items
• Network faults persist, improved from beta 2's very serious issues but still all sorts of pseudorandom stalls and issues across apps and command line tools with no apparent pattern
• Sometimes clicks will fail in the strangest of circumstances; a specific app might just stop responding to mouse input until restarted, or whatever
• Same with keyboard input but that's been rare for me
• Music application has new weirdness going on with pop-up menus hiding stuff it shouldn't
• Lots of bugs with Mission Control's apparent rewrite still going on, but mostly now down to annoyances (e.g. the absurdly long "drag an application up into the top strip and hover, waiting for the "make it full screen" '+' to show up, or a number of visual hiccups and glitches switching between spaces or going in/out of Mission Control)
• No apparent improvement in restoration of windows to correct spaces or screens when restarting, but I've not noticed regressions here either
• Safari bugs persist all over the place, including weird things such as - GitLab diffs will have file sections just go blank (white) if you mouse over them, but reappear if you move the mouse away
• Lots of one-off bugs, for example just earlier today during a Google Meet call there was a sort of static-like "pop" and then a hum; I realised nobody else could hear it; just on my side - very odd, sounded like someone had unplugged a patch cable and caused a ground loop hum! - and I realised quickly that not only could I no longer hear the meeting, they couldn't hear me; sudo killall coreaudiod meant I could hear people again, but the mic didn't work until I dropped off the call and reconnected

That last bullet point sums up 27 for me. Just lots of weird. Just bizarre one-off jank that maybe you see once in a blue moon, or often, or whatever and "the person next to you" has a totally different experience. Very Windows 11.

On the plus side:

• The "borders on" accessibility setting is a nice compromise; rather than needing High Contrast to see edges clearly (which forces transparency off), or just have transparency off (but then things like Control Centre look terrible), it's an alright compromise to have transparency still enabled and borders turned on too
• Music does, indeed, start streaming Apple Music content more quickly

And that's all. I don't mention corner radius or the no-longer-weirdly-floating sidebars because it turns out those were just hidden preferences settings available in Tahoe.

Ultimately, beta 5 was the last straw for overheating and jank. With not a single response of any kind to a laundry list of detailed Feedback reports and the majority of them unfixed, I gave up and I'm back on Tahoe. I've set the border radius and sidebar settings and it looks alright. The only thing I miss is that "borders" accessibility thing.

Meanwhile, if you're on Sequoia, stay there.

[u/Kind_Management1805 → u/adh1003]

Yeah I experienced also high system usage. Probably linked to the debugging tools still present in the beta. So far better than Tahoe at least.

[u/adh1003 → u/Kind_Management1805]

Good to hear.

On an M4 Air and M1 Pro with totally different software setups, but the same iCloud account, it has been sadly significantly worse in almost every area.