[alin23]

macOS 26 has to be the most breaking version so far, its problems and intended breaking changes making my app dev life so hard this year. Just to name a few:

- Reference Presets no longer allow setting arbitrary SDR nits, making it impossible to natively unlock 1600nits of brightness on MacBook Pros or 2000nits on Studio Display XDR which breaks my Lunar app [0] (this seems to be intended, no idea what hurt Apple that they had to block this under SIP)

- The orange microphone dot indicator and its very colored friends can no longer have their brightness changed for dimming them, which made my YellowDot app useless [1] (I guess this is for privacy, I still think this could have a setting guarded under TouchID like Accessibility Permissions works)

- Floating non-titled windows don't accept mouse events (thankfully this got fixed) [2]

- Gamma table changes don't work on MacBook Neo and M5 Pro/Max which breaks Sub-zero Dimming and dimming external monitors that don't support DDC (thankfully, Apple is looking into it) [3]

- The resizing area thing on very rounded windows which drives everyone nuts, I had to add custom resize handlers to some of my windows

- The `com.apple.SwiftUI.Drag-` temporary file paths that get generated for any file that gets dragged from a drag&drop handler which makes it impossible to get to the original file when dragging images from Clop [4] or file shelf apps like Yoink, Dropover etc.

- NSImage returning different pixel count for .size than what the image actually has, breaking workflows that depended on that to determine the image DPI

[0] https://lunar.fyi/#xdr

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/YellowDot/issues/18

[2] https://developer.apple.com/forums//thread/814798

[3] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/819331

[4] https://lowtechguys.com/clop

[pier25]

There are rumors iOS 27 will be a sort of Snow Leopard update with no new features [1]. Just bug fixes and performance improvements.

Hopefully Apple will do the same for macOS 27.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-will-reportedly-...

[hulitu]

> Just bug fixes and performance improvements.

So more bugs and no improvements, just like Google.

[KennyBlanken]

> The orange microphone dot indicator and its very colored friends can no longer have their brightness changed for dimming them, which made my YellowDot app useless [1] (I guess this is for privacy

It absolutely is for privacy, to stop malware or trojan programs from obscuring their accessing the camera or microphone.

> Reference Presets no longer allow setting arbitrary SDR nits, making it impossible to natively unlock 1600nits of brightness on MacBook Pros or 2000nits on Studio Display XDR which breaks my Lunar app [0] (this seems to be intended, no idea what hurt Apple that they had to block this under SIP)

OLED displays are widely expected this year. Not wanting to have to deal with "my battery life is an hour and a half instead of 10, what's going on!? Replace my battery!" nonsense is probably the remainder.

[jesse_dot_id]

As a hobbyist music producer with an interface always connected, that microphone indicator is so annoying and unnecessary. I can't believe it can't just be disabled outright. I like macOS but it's too opinionated and some of those opinions SUCK.

[NL807]

Yeah I can see that being a source of annoyance for situations like yours. However, I welcome it from a privacy perspective. The indicator alerts the user if some nefarious application covertly enables the microphone.

[jesse_dot_id]

Yeah, I fully understand why it's there — and also why it's not optional — but I hate that it's not optional.

[user3939382]

I had a nice wrapper on blueutil so I could do “hp” and “btoff” which meant turn on bluetooth and connect my headphones, or shut off bluetooth. I used this 5x a day. They just decided to randomly remove that API which was me fixing their clunky horrible bluetooth workflow.

[kuschku]

Re: Yellowdot, have you considered setting a LUT to the display that maps the color of the recording dot to black, then setting a LUT to every other window that maps the same color to a nearby similar color?

Not a macOS user, but I feel like that might still work.

[alin23]

It could, but there's no possibility to apply a LUT to a realtime framebuffer on macOS. But it would have been a clever solution if it was possible.

[nowahe]

Ah I was wondering why I couldn't get past 600 nits on my M5 why it worked great on my M1. Guess I'll just have to live without it for now

[alin23]

It's still possible with the older forced HDR + Gamma tone-mapping logic, but it has its limitations. The native unlocking was miles better.