What’s New In macOS Tahoe 26.1

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at what's new in macOS Tahoe 26.1.

So macOS Tahoe 26.1 just came out and you can get it by going into System Settings and then going to General and Software Update. If you haven't yet updated to macOS Tahoe and your Mac is compatible you'll get Tahoe here and it will take you right to 26.1. If you're at 26.0 then you'll get the Update 26.1 here. 

Now the change that everybody has been talking about is a new setting under Appearance. You go there you'll find a setting right here near the top, there's a setting for Liquid Glass, Clear or Tinted. You can switch between them. If you didn't see any real change to my screen when I switched  that's because the change is very subtle. As a matter of fact there's really nothing here that is going to change at all. As a matter of fact if I create a new Finder window, like this, and you look closely at the sidebar here as I change from Clear to Tinted you'll see a subtle change. I'll go back to Clear here and zoom in and see if you can see it now. It's hard to see even with the Apple Studio display and it is high resolution and HDR. But in this video it is going to be even harder to see that through the video compression. But there is a slight change between Clear and Tinted. 

It is still nothing compared to what you get if you go to Accessibility and then Display and then turn on Reduced Transparency. That's a much bigger difference. In fact if you have this turned On and you go back to Appearance note that you can't actually make this switch. This only works if you're not using the Reduced Transparency here. 

Now, besides that is a change to Spotlight, particularly the Spotlight section that shows Apps. Now you get to that by using Command Space or clicking on the Magnifying Glass at the top and then Command 1 to go to Applications. You may notice the difference right away if you've been using this. It's much wider. One of the complaints before was if you're going to use Spotlight to launch apps why make it so small? Have it take up most of the screen. This is much wider. It's actually 7 columns now instead of just 5. So you can fit more apps here into the grid. It doesn't make really any difference if you switch to List View because you're just getting one per line anyway. But definitely with Grid View it makes a difference. 

Now in addition to that the sections have changed. If you just use this normally you would normally scroll and you would find a section here called Utilities. That section is now called Other. So it maybe  is more accurate because not everything in here is going to be utility. In addition if you have iPhone Apps and you've got that enabled in your settings, the iPhone apps would be a separate section after your Mac Apps. They wouldn't be all mixed in together. That setting here is in System Settings and is under Spotlight and then here under Results for apps near the bottom is iPhone Apps. So if you have that turned On that's when you would see your iPhone Apps there and launching one of those would then use iPhone Mirroring and take you directly to that app. So the only change here is just separating them out. Now when you look at your list of apps it is Mac Apps first and then iPhone Apps after it. But you can still search for both. 

Now another section in here, of course, is using Command 4 and going to the Clipboard. So the Clipboard here will save any text, images, and some other things that you copy and put them in here as a history. Previously a lot of people complained that it only saved the items for eight hours. That was it. It was the only option you had. After eight hours an item would basically disappear from that list. But now, if you go to System Settings and then Spotlight and all the way at the bottom you've got a setting for the time. It is eight hours for thirty minutes if you prefer to have things in there for a shorter period of time maybe for security or maybe you use the Clipboard a lot and you just don't want the list to get very long. Or you can have it set for seven days if you prefer items to be around longer. 

Also notice there is a Clear Clipboard History button here now in System Settings under Spotlight. So you can clear the history right here. This isn't new functionality. As before you could go here and Clear History right here in the Spotlight Menu. 

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Now there are a couple of icon changes, very minor but other people mentioned them. Notice the Hard Drive Icon there looks a little bit different than it did in Tahoe version 26.0. There's also a new TV App Icon now taking on some of that coloring that Apple's now using in some of its marketing. 

There are other things as well. One of them is Apple Intelligence and the Live Translation feature that relies on Apple Intelligence has now expanded to more languages. Now it works with Chinese, both traditional and simplified Japanese, and Korean. In addition there was a bug before if you used Automix with Apple Music. Automix is a great feature that blends one song into another when you're listening to a playlist. It works in macOS Tahoe 26.0 just fine unless you were using AirPlay to send the audio to some other device. Then it didn't work. That's been fixed so it works over AirPlay now. Also, another audio fix is improved audio when using FaceTime. One other change here can be seen in System Settings if you are managing the settings for a child using Parental Controls. Now if you go into ScreenTime and let's say you switch to the child that you are managing there. Communication Safety is going to have Communication Safety on by default. If you had it on already it doesn't change anything. Also under Content & Privacy for the web content it's already set, I believe, probably to limit adult websites as  the default, though it's hard to tell since I already had this setup for another tutorial. 

People are also reporting that macOS Tahoe 26.1 is running a little faster and using a little less battery power on MacBooks which is good and that maybe some other minor bugs are fixed as well although I am sure there are plenty of bugs still for Apple to work on in future updates. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.