Stop macOS 26 nagging with one tiny policy tweak Averse to "liquid glass"? Are you happy enough with your Mac as it is? Try this local policy and banish those upgrade nag screens for a few months. Stop Tahoe Update is a tiny script that persuades macOS to stop urging you to upgrade to macOS 26. Rather than any scary low-level hackery, it merely installs an even tinier custom …
I have the last Intel-based Mac which Apple ever made.
Still works fine for me. If I need more horsepower, that's why work bought me a Threadripper.
This sounds like an awesome tweak.
If it's not broke, then don't fix it, at least not until the community says, "this upgrade is one you can't imagine living without!"
This is precisely why so many people use Mac. I have enough gear to support without having to fight with my own laptop.
I wouldn't mind if cosmetic stuff like Liquid Glass was accompanied by bug fixes and app feature and performance improvements but as far as I can tell Tahoe is mainly a cosmetic upgrade with downgrades in performance for Mac Music and anything on SMB. I say "as far as I can tell" cos I haven't updated from Sequoia yet and, based on the more educated whinging over on the Apple boards, I'm not going to bother any time soon.
Theres' also a script-based fix for Tahoe's over-rounded window corners somewhere out there.
Replace the x.com with nitter.net or xcancel.com.
Use the LibRedirect browser extension to automatically redirect links.
"So when did Apple start pulling an intel/nvidia/amd with the stupid naming scheme. MacOS 16 being v26..."
The clue's in the version number. This year they went from OS names updated approx every two years with some sort of number** to version numbers based on the year of release. 27 is, allegedly, due next year. But then again, this is Apple, and if it doesn't happen that way then it'll be our fault for holding the calendar wrong.
** it was all version 10.x from 2001 to 2019 through a total of 16 named OS's (according to Wikipedia).
> This year they went from OS names updated approx every two years with some sort of number
Nah. I spelled this out in the article.
With 10.9 Mavericks, codenames went from cats to California. OS X became a free download. Updates became annual.
Since 10.9 it's been every year until 10.15 Catalina -- the next version was macOS 11 "Big Sur". Fair enough: by then OS X had been around longer than Classic MacOS had (17 years, 1984-2001.)
Really arguably the point should have been in 2018, which was Mojave. Me personally, I liked Mojave, and I reckon Catalina the next year was the better point: that was the first version that dropped 32-bit support and a lot of older Macs.
I stayed on Mojave for about 5 years. I wanted 32-bit MS Word with no blasted Ribbon.
Anyway. They didn't. Big Sur was the one, in 2020. A sort of round number. That dropped the "10.x" naming and went to 11.
It's one louder, isn't it?
Then came 12 "Monterey" -- I am still running that here -- 13 "Ventura", 14 "Sonoma", and 15 "Sequoia".
Then last year they junked versioned releases, after a quarter of a century, because macOS still hadn't caught up with iOS. What incompetent did not make that happen? ;-)
"because macOS still hadn't caught up with iOS. What incompetent did not make that happen? ;-)"
Be careful what you wish for. We're already seeing the iosification of Mac apps. Reminders is easier to use on iPhone than on Mac. Music on Mac has been unloved and ignored since it replaced iTunes and I bet that at some point soon it will be replaced by something that looks like the iOS app and is useless. Podcasts app - FFS.
I suspect there's a push in Apple to gradually turn MacOS into iOS and I despair that that style really has become more important than substance. I suspect I'll be sticking with Tahoe as long as I can with this Mac because Music is tolerable and my Time Capsules work.
> initial online DRM activation of the OS
You are thinking of Microsoft.
There's no licensing of macOS. It's freeware, based on FOSS, has no serial number, no licence key, no activation or anything.
Because you already bought the only hardware it runs on: Apple makes its money from Macs not the OS.
But you could also run it on an x86 PC since Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" in 2006. And I did, for years, and it was great. I used a desktop so I didn't use sleep or hibernation or care about power management: I turned it on in the morning and turned it off at night. I used an ADB to USB converter so my Hackintosh had a real Apple keyboard so it felt like typing on a Mac. I had an old discarded nVidia card from a mate driving two 21" CRTs so a honking great desktop.
I ran 10.6 "Snow Leopard", already obsolete, so no pesky updates to stop it booting. I had no Apple apps connecting to the Internet anyway. I used almost entirely FOSS on it.
I have written about this repeatedly:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/07/fosss_to_tame_macos/
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/25/go_foss_keep_your_os/
I have no payment method on my Apple account. It is literally impossible for me to buy anything, apps, media content, anything. Everything you want on a Mac is FOSS anyway from the GIMP to LibreOffice, and if you don't know how to use anything except proprietary apps, then that is a liveware error. PEBCAK.
Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard.
The snag is going to be macOS 27, which will almost certainly only run on Arm Macs. That kills the Hackintosh.
But it was a fun run for 20 years. Can't complain. The last Intel version will work for years to come.
"I had an old discarded nVidia card from a mate driving two 21" CRTs so a honking great desktop"
That's basically a dual beam particle accelerator lol.
Seriously add in the actual desktop and thats about 4 to 6 KWh of electricity each working day. The heat would keep the Irish Sea damp at bay though I imagine.
Icon: I'll close the door as I leave. I enjoyed my G4 iBook (aka IKEA computer) for a couple of years just after the millennium.
> That's basically a dual beam particle accelerator lol.
They used to call it an Atom Tan: the nerd version of a sunbed.
"Atomtan" was the first self-published comic by Hewlett & Martin, co-creators of Tank Girl, later in Deadline Magazine, of which I was a loyal reader. I was there, 3000 years ago...
Jamie Hewlett later provided the visuals for Gorillaz, what Damon Albarn did next after Blur.
I was living in Mitcham in my personal Hackintosh era, though. Years before even freelancing for El Reg.
Not sure of the relevance of a G4 iBook, but I have one in storage in the basement in Prague. I must dig it out. You can run MacOS 9 on them now, making them one of the fastest Classic-OS Macs ever released, as opposed to one of the slower Mac OS X computers.
> Avoiding an Apple payment account is nearly as bad as avoiding an Amazon Prime subscription.
(?)
I set it up in about 1996 on my shiny new Hotmail account. Apple didn't support payment methods back then. It was mainly for commenting in their help forums.
Now, it's quite hard.
I don't have Amazon Prime, either. Or any paid streaming accounts with anyone. Screw those guys. Yee-har me mateys! Avast ye and away to the Torrents!
I was forced to update the OS on my mac laptop to get the obviously cracked screen repaired.
Towards the end of a five year book project using LaTeX, I cracked my mac laptop's screen on the lower left. I did not want to upgrade because I was making revisions and comparing PDFs. I was concerned that upgrading the OS would require an upgrade to LaTeX, or that the underlying tools in the new OS would not generate the same PDF at the bit level.
At some point, I felt like the book was pretty much done and was willing to take the risk. I made an appointment and was told if Apple was to do the repair, then Apple required the machine to be upgraded.
It was almost code-brown at the Genius Bar.
Anyway, it all turned out OK, I did not have to upgrade LaTeX and the new PDF had the same pagination as the previous one. In addition, Adobe Acrobat's PDF comparison tool worked fine.
I was relieved, as I had to make more revisions.
It boggles the mind that they require an OS upgrade for obvious hardware repair.
Ah well, that's Apple.
> You can downdate to Sequoia.
Well, you can back up all your stuff, format, and reinstall Sequoia, anyway. I could be wrong but I thought that was the only way... no?
After I read about the new UI and thought "no ta" I saw a few people posting about doing just that, and decided not to upgrade until macOS 15 goes end of life. But I'll probably need to format and reinstall: my titchy SSD has already gone from macOS 11 to 12, 13, 14, now 15 and soon enough 26.
Each version leaves some stuff behind. Each has its own wallpapers including the pretty but egregiously large video wallpapers I got in Sonoma (I think?).
Waaaaaaaay back in the XPostFacto era, when we intrepid few were running the new OS X on unsupported pre-Return-of-Saint-Stephen-of-Jobs PowerMacs, there were great little community tools to remove the excess cruft from OS X.
• DeInternationalizer removed all international language support except the one you use.
* CageFighter returned Mail.app buttons to have their own shapes
* One whose name I forget disabled drop shadows on windows, boosting performance
* Another forced Quartz Extreme on, on unsupported GPUs
And so on. And the great XPostFacto (from Ryan Rempel I think) which let you install OS X on pre-G3 PowerMacs.
I want a DeInternationalizer today. And a DeVideoWallpaperer too.
"Well, you can back up all your stuff, format, and reinstall Sequoia, anyway. I could be wrong but I thought that was the only way... no?"
Yes - you're correct, 'downdate' was misleading. I sort of assumed that people round here would do a bit of research before jumping in and doing it.
That is far better than a "reinstall Windows and... " the and meant sitting idle for nearly two days while it updated itself and rebooted endless times. That's what happened to my neighbours PC after [drumroll], a windows update borked it.
Apple has many, many faults but I've only had one update problem in 20 years. The old 2006 MBP is happily running Linux at a friends house. Battery life is 20-30 minutes but she does not care.
Oh minutes, luck you! I used to dream of minutes of battery life on my old MacBook. Disconnect the power, and it immediately turned off. Also the trackpad was suspiciously domed where the dead battery pack had expanded. But still acceptable running Linux as controller for my 3D printer.
So, I don't hate macOS 26. I mean, once you turn on "Reduce transparency" that is, but I've had that turned on for years because the menu bar should be black text on a light background.
But for Macs running OpenCore Legacy Patcher, it's a no-go for now - as in, it'll break lots of stuff like your keyboard and mouse, and your computer will be unusable. And those computers will happily offer you 26. Not a big deal if you know not to click the button, but I've got users who can't resist, and then I get to wipe and reinstall a machine. Good for my wallet, bad for my and my client's annoyance level.
So this is INCREDIBLY helpful. Thanks for letting us know about it.
I have a fairly old Mac Mini on which the HDMI port doesn't work.
It stopped displaying anything after an OS update one time (I forget what; I do remember massive denials by Apple and others that the OS had anything to do with it, along with many people complaining that after said update their Minis had ceased to output HDMI signals) which was a bit of a problem becasue it was the mini I used to run AC2.
As luck would have it I had previously enabled SSH on the beast so I could remote in and set up the RealVNC remote desktop connection from my Windoze box.
These days I have a new Mac Mini... which is almost good enough, even with Liquid Glass, to use as a daily driver. Sadly Windows is the corporate preferred platorm so I have to have a PC as well.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2026
