The whole “refuse to upgrade because of Liquid Glass” is overblown and unwarranted in my view.
Agreed. it would be interesting to know what proportion of people not upgrading have actual experience of Tahoe and iOS26, and are not upgrading because of what they have read on forums. I am not saying some people don’t have real problems, but I do agree that the negativity is overblown. I believe I am part of a silent majority.
I did some early x26 testing and had to help a couple clients that upgraded (albeit, unwittingly). I have been less-than-enthused with certain UI and style changes in the past, but we usually can adapt and keep working because the core elements and functionality remained. x26 gets in the way more than anything I can remember in my years working on the Mac.
Sadly, due to recent years of early-adopter-gotchas, I no longer upgrade my daily use, mission critical Macs for the better part of a year until I see the new hotness has settled and become stable.
I have much less first hand time with iOS 26. I used to upgrade quickly, but now have the same growing concerns about early adoption headaches. I already waste a lot of time every day fighting with bugs and interface issues that have existed for years. I don’t need more layers of that in my pocket device that is mostly for communication and organization.
I upgraded to iOS 26 on my phones to keep getting security updates.
I see no compelling reason to upgrade my Macs from MacOS 15 at this time. There’s just nothing there that I want. At some point, I may well skip straight to 27.
As with most things, satisfied customers rarely bother to voice their opinions.
I have no doubt that many people who have upgraded are genuinely satisfied. That’s great for them. I do think that anecdotally there’s a larger contingent than usual of abstaining users, people who would normally have updated but have decided against it this time. To me this indicates that there’s a lot of dissatisfaction with the quality of this cycle of updates. Of course I don’t have the concrete numbers to prove that, so I don’t pretend any of this is definitive.
Side note: I did a little research and it seems that if you’ve decided not to update, it’s unfortunately not possible to remove the red badge from the System Settings app icon that indicates there’s an update available. That to me is the most annoying part of abstaining—I hate badges!
You can remove the red bubble/badge with a terminal command and prevent it reappearing using a device profile. Takes a restart to settle down. I did it on my Mac.
The first link above is to a thread on MacRumors Forum about how to defer Tahoe update and block software update from installing os updates. I think I have 4 profiles installed, and some hosts file entries to keep things out. Fort Knox.
This isn’t the first time I’ve skipped a macOS update. I skipped 10.15 Catalina and 13 Ventura entirely, and I sat on Sonoma until after 26 had been announced, at which point I bought an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18 (I was running an iPhone XS with iOS 17!) and MBP M4 Pro running macOS 15.
In my previous experience the eventual need to update come mostly from Safari incompatibility as websites decided it was to old. But I think that’s less of a problem today. And the odd third party app from developers who refuse to support more than the latest OS.
Thanks Matt that’s helpful. I’m actually more focused on the red badges on iOS, which I find even more annoying. If there’s a way to get rid of those, that would be great.
The easiest way I know to get rid of nag badges in macOS is to replace the Settings icon in your Dock with an alias to it.
I wish there were such a simple and straightforward way to do the same in iOS.
Primarily because of the preponderance on negative comments about all the OS 26’s here I was very reluctant to ‘upgrade’. I have felt absolutely no pressure from Apple to upgrade any of my devices. Sure there are reminders that an upgrade is available but a red dot on my System Settings icon, or notifications that an update is available do not disturb me in any way. In December I cautiously tried iOS 26 and found it to be fine on my phone, so installed iPadOS 26. I may not be a fan of the transparency effect when applied to folders in iPadOS, probably dependent on what’s behind, but that’s just a niggle.
A few days ago I finally decided to give MacOS 26 a try. I was very concerned that my setup would suddenly be too awful to look at, but no, I have not found that to be the case. I have zero issues with the hated ‘liquid glass’ or any other changes to the look or function of my regularly used Apple or other apps.
So, put me on the side of those who normally wouldn’t have said anything because it’s all good for me, but in this case I thought I should go ahead and report a positive experience.
The easiest way is to sign up to the iOS 18 beta track (which won’t receive any more updates). This gets rid of the red badge on iOS. I did this too 
It’s maybe not simple and straightforward, but it reportedly can be done without switching to the beta.
The workaround at the linked article reminds me of a recent excursion into trying to add sounds I’ve recorded in VoiceMemos App as options for alarms and things in iPad Shortcuts app, etc.
It’s about 8 or ten steps involving Garage Band. Suppose I should be happy it’s possible at all.
Or just pluck System Settings out of your Dock.
You can quickly open System Settings from the Apple menu at any time.
It’s pretty hard to have actual experience with Tahoe and iOS26 until you upgrade, but by then it’s too late. So yeah, I rely a lot on reviews and what people say on forums.
I’m all in on the upgrades to my MBP M4 Pro, iPad 12.9 M4, iPhone 17, and watch 10. Some bugs but it all works fine for me.
Well, yes, of course. Assuming it doesn’t need to be there that’s great. But perhaps you want it there because then you can use right-click to go straight to the section you need.
At least on a Mac, you can install Tahoe in a virtual machine, even on an older host machine. For example, I installed Tahoe in a Parallels VM on an M1 Mac running Sequoia.
Skipping even a few updates in a row is not new for me, as I am always weighing pros and cons of update and trying to understand if I was missing some announced feature to the extent that additional burden on the hardware can justify the upgrade. That was the case with Mountain Lion, Mojave and Catalina, to name a few. And so it happens with the Tahoe. However, I’ve upgraded my iPhone 13 to iOS 26 and now regretting, as broken things like inability to stream to any of my four HomePod mini around the house or absolutely senseless redesign of the Battery section of System Settings were not expected, to say the least.
I’ve installed Tahoe on the external SSD and periodically launching it trying to persuade myself that it is acceptable, but with zero success so far. If it ain’t broken, no need to fix it.
I usually wait until Feb-March before contemplating updating any OS, when I have a better idea of what the problems might be, but this time I knew that Firewire was going away. My solution is a base-spec Mac Mini M4 that will only ever run Sequoia and will host all of the legacy devices. It’s working very well and was much cheaper than replacing the older kit, which I still like a lot.
For my production MacBook Pro, I will defer much longer before replacing Sequoia. A friend who installed both macOS 26 and iPadOS 26 gave me a demo of both, and I didn’t like what I saw. He regrets making the upgrades and has a slew of new bugs that he is trying to work around.
If any of my foundational applications require macOS 26 in the future, it might make me think about it, or I’ll move them to the Mini. The forthcoming loss of Rosetta II will be another interesting hurdle. I suspect I’ll be staying put until the WWDC at least, to see how the land lies. This is the first time in 45 years I have balked at making an upgrade, but the accumulated lack of goodwill toward Applesoft is making me stubborn.
If the question was who wishes they’d skipped Tahoe, that would be me. I knew I would be losing my scanner’s Firewire, but no worries, it also has an USB port. Unfortunately, Tahoe broke that too.
To be fair, I don’t know if its USB ever worked w/ macOS. Ed Hamrick tells me that it has a not-quite spec. USB, that Windows is more forgiving of.
Nonetheless, I am in the middle of the biggest nightmare macOS back-out ever…
My calendar is simply not restorable. Safari now is missing choices in settings popup menus. Photos…library keeps appearing in Trash after reboots (from where I don’t know - don’t use it, and not from my Pictures folder… New discoveries every day… :-(