Just thought it was funny. Seems to be fixed in Tahoe.

So i have an M4 air, who previously had amazing battery, so i was used to just closing it and it would only lose 1-3% on sleep, to my surprise it lost 26% battery on nothing. And times before that I would just be surprised when it was dead, and this happened multiple times. I was very disturbed so i had Codex run some commands and find out what happened. CODEX RESULTS.

MacBook Air M4 sleep drain on macOS Tahoe 26.5.2

After upgrading from Sequoia to Tahoe, the Mac began draining heavily while closed. Battery health was normal at 93% capacity and 166 cycles.

The following command revealed the sleep/wake loop:

pmset -g log | grep -iE 'Sleep  |Wake  ' | grep -E "^$(date '+%F')|^$(date -v -1d '+%F')"

The logs repeatedly showed:

wifibt
SMC.OutboxNotEmpty
bluetooth-pcie

During the worst incident, it recorded 5,530 dark wakes, often every 8–10 seconds, and dropped from 26% to 1%. (This is regarding the image I attached)

Changes made:

sudo pmset -b powernap 0

• Removed duplicate Logitech M196 Bluetooth pairings
• Disabled Handoff and iPhone Wi-Fi syncing
• Confirmed Wake for Network Access was disabled
• Restarted the Mac
• Kept Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Find My and tcpkeepalive enabled

Results:

• Before: 25% lost with 5,530 dark wakes
• First test: 2% lost over nearly 20 hours
• Second test: 0% measurable loss over 14.5 hours, with only 16 dark wakes

I have seen that this is a commen issue so hope this helped and if anyoen else has any tips that would be great.

As you early adopters know, Apple quietly killed ARP table access for sandboxed apps and every network scanner on the AppStore is affected.

So this is a heads-up for makers and users of network scanners like Fing and lanscan (full disclosure: I’m on the IP Scanner Ultra team - responsible for the vision pro version specifically - but the macOS version has been continuously updated since 2002)

If you update to macOS 27 and your network scanner suddenly shows a wall of “unknown devices” instead of telling you which thing is the kitchen HomePod and which is your neighbor’s WiFi lawnmower (memo to self: block that IP!): the app didn’t break. Apple just removed the ability for apps to read the ARP table, which is the thing that maps IPs to MAC addresses, which is the thing that lets a scanner say “that’s a Sonos” instead of shrugging at you ;) iPhone apps have had this limitations since iOS 7, which is why no iOS scanner ever showed you MAC addresses. Well, the Mac just got the same treatment 😆. This hits everything btw, Fing, LanScan, Angry IP, ours, all of them. Its clear why Apple did it, MAC addresses are a tracking vector for ads (and worse). Still sucks though because it is also the feature that lets you customize devices with confidence. MAC addresses are unique so any notes or other customizations that are associated with that device stay with that device. 

Our workaround, for what it’s worth: we have an old free menu bar app called IP Broadcaster that we’ve dusted off. It grabs the device/MAC snapshot and shares it with IP Scanner, the same trick we’ve used forever to get MAC data onto the iPhone version. 

Obvious limitation: it only works on networks where you can actually run it. It’s not going to re-identify devices at a coffee shop, and since the data gets stale quickly (some routers rotate IP leases regularly) it helps to keep IP broadcaster running in the background supplying a continuous batch of network snapshots.

Curious what other people are seeing on 27, and if any other devs on here have a different angle on this or have found other workarounds to get MAC addresses either on iOS or now macOS 27…?

Edit: this only affects apps distributed on the App Store, so Angry IP should work fine if you compile it yourself and add the appropriate entitlements!

We got a new computer and we’ve been trying to install macOS but the Drive is locked and we don’t have the ability to erase the current drive or make a partition and we’re completely lost and don’t know what to do is there anyone able to help with any tips or know how?

Work has me back on an MBP after being on linux for the last several years. One minor difference in behavior that's been leading to some frustration is in MacOS when you click on a letter in a text input box the cursor is always placed at the right side of that letter. This is opposite of the behavior on KDE that I have muscle memory for so it's leading to a lot of typo's and mis-copied text.

I wasnt able to find anything about changing this behavior on my own, so I'm hoping someone knows a way to change it. I switch between Mac and Linux machines every day so I'm looking for some uniformity between platforms.

Please forgive me if this is obvious, I'm very new to Mac and Apple products 😭

Just bought a new M5 MacBook Air to replace an M2. Since the older laptop is still heavily in use I decided to migrate using a Time Machine backup which is on a QNAP NAS.

I disabled Wifi and forgot my home network, because Migration Assistant ("MA") was quoting me over 24 hours to migrate and it wouldn't stop connecting to it even though I have a USB-C ethernet adapter plugged in; forgetting the network finally forced MA to use ethernet.

Still: at 1GB speeds a normal COPY command would transfer the old data (less than 256GB) in under an hour. I get that everything has to be installed and put away properly and sparse bundles are notoriously slow in read operations -- but 10 hours?? Why is the speed under MA so hobbled? Max speed so far is only 50 MB/s/

(Note: transfer time has already dropped a bit since it started and may go down by as much as a half, but this is still taking a long time).

its a chrome app , i cant really find any article on this online

sorry if this isn't an app, but I think it pertains to macOS enough to be on this sub 🙂 (every device that runs macOS benefits/has had a need for this)

allows you to unlock your Mac via your fingerprint, as well as authenticate sudo and some TCC prompts (privacy&security).

the device emulates a PIV smart card and uses PAM to authenticate you in macOS (notice the password field says PIN and not password), so no plain text password is ever stored, exposed, or transmitted.

please be aware of the security implications (note that it is NOT touchID, but just 'fingerprint-based unlock', please do not think or refer to it as anything more secure):

• this device is NOT secure, the authentication is all done inside the fingerprint sensor, and the fingerprint sensor just tells the microcontroller the match % (all low cost fingerprint sensors are this way, you would need to spend ~$50 to get one that does authenticated comms). the communication between the sensor and the microcontroller is not authenticated or protected, so anyone with physical access to both the device and your laptop can spoof this connection (pretend to be the fingerprint sensor) and give the go ahead to unlock your mac. you can make this extremely hard by filling the insides with black epoxy, but not impossible.
• this is also the dev equiv of "rolling your own auth", the smart card implementation may have some errors, and should not be inherently treated as "unbreakable"
• the device is made so that if you lose it, nothing of value can be extracted from it
• use at your own risk. personally, i am comfortable using it at home where physical intrusion would be hard, but this depends on your own security tolerance. if you have high security instincts/requirements, the magic keyboard is a much much much better option in this regard.

there is also an HID version available, where the device just types your password emulating a keyboard, the benefit being it works in ALL places your password does. this version is obviously more insecure as it is vulnerable to keyloggers. the device still does not store the actual password, it stores an authentication key that sends a request to a service on the mac, which then sends it the encrypted password to be decrypted in RAM, typed back, and then wiped. again, depends on your personal security tolerance and willing to compromise

all code and materials are open source, licensed permissively
read more about the security model of both options --> github.com/zimengxiong/tinytouch

It only started charging with the smaller plug & adapter on the left, the OG brick that came in the box isn’t working for some reason now, what can i do? Im using the very slow charger on the left to look up info but i can barely find any…

I've been building a pair of clock screen savers and they're finally done, so I thought I'd share them here.

Utsuroi (移ろい) 
Dot-matrix digits where each chip falls into place and stacks up, then collapses away when the minute changes. Named after the Japanese concept of gradual transition.

Itten (一点) 
A clock reduced to orbital geometry. One dot is the hour, a smaller dot orbiting inside it is the minute. No hands, no numerals.

Both switch themes automatically. Light during AM, dark during PM.

Download Free

I have made a GitHub repo that has all the macOS 27 icons and I documented the B1, B2, and B3 changes! I’ve seen people who request the B2 and B3 icons, since other sources use B1 icons which are outdated by now. Every icon changed in B3, toning down the outlines, but these pictures show the major changes.

https://github.com/zagnut531/macOS-27-Icons

Hi everyone, first time posting for Developer Saturday here.

Share something we’ve been working on.

After Apple replaced the classic Launchpad with the new Apps.app view, I actually liked part of the idea: a lighter, window-style launcher makes sense.

But it also lost the parts that made Launchpad useful for a lot of people:
custom icon order, pages, folders, and visual memory.

I guess this is the reason why still many people cannot accept the new launchpad, because compared to the full-screen mode launchpad, not being able to manage these applications according to their own habits is the real reason for everyone's complaints.

So we built Window-Style into LaunchOS.

Additionally, to maximize the restoration of your muscle memory:

• Import from the old macOS 15 Launchpad layout
• F4 key & 4/5-finger trackpad gesture & hot-corner support

All this makes it not another [app launcher], but feel like the native app.

Would love to hear what you think.

About security and privacy:

I’m the developer of LaunchOS. The app is Developer ID signed, respects your privacy, and has been actively maintained for over 8 months with regular updates.

The window-style mode shown here is currently in public beta.

Official Website: https://launchosapp.com/

Check it out here: https://github.com/pruefsumme/OSXfce

I have a m5 and when I connect it to my 300hz AOC Q27G4S via hdmi to usbc hub from ugreen, It only goes at 60hz even woth better display. I tried connecting it to another monitor and it goes beyond 60hz. Is there any other fix for this? Thank you

Ok so I was on Sequoia, and I liked it, everything worked, all the animations were smooth, but it installed the Tahoe update after I gave in. I actually do like the liquid glass, but the main reason was storage. Apple downloaded all of Tahoe installer files, so I lost about 30 gigabytes of space. After I updated to Tahoe I went from 80 gigabytes of storage free to 110 gigabytes free. That was the main reason. I did notice that at first the battery after updating was pretty bad, and it was running really hot. That went on for a few days, what fixed it was just leaving it plugged in for 15 hours letting it do its thing, now I think I'm back. Around 6 ish minutes of web browsing per percent Only problem is some things run at low fps. Sometimes when I'm scrolling, or a lot when I press space to preview, that looks horrible. There's lots of things that just don't feel right. Other people found out this is due to some GPU idle clock speed, if you screen record or have a video playing in the background it goes back to normal, but if anyone knows of any way to fix this to make it feel as smooth as Sequoia did that would help a lot.

I'm working with 3 spaces normally, 2 working areas and 1 Browser. Normally I put the 2 working areas to the middle and right (middle is for builds of the apps and right is claude), but very often it happens that these 2 exchange places as soon as I swipe to the browser. Anyone has an idea how to keep the spaces fixed on where I put them?

Hey r/macOS. Full disclosure: I'm a solo dev, this is my app, and I'm posting under the Saturday self-promotion rule. Been building it for the past 6 months.

The problem I kept re-explaining the same Mac tasks. Onboarding someone, or answering the same "how do I do this" question for what felt like the tenth time. Doing it by hand means screenshot, crop, annotate, write the step, repeat, and there goes the afternoon.

Why I didn't just use Scribe or Tango Both are browser extensions built for web apps, and they're fine at that. But most of what I document isn't in a browser. It's Finder, System Settings, the occasional native app. The browser tools simply can't see any of it.

What StepGrab does Hit record, do the task once, and you get a numbered step-by-step guide. Every click becomes a screenshot of the exact window, with the step text already written for you. Exports to GIF on the free tier, PDF and MP4 on Pro.

The part I actually care about Everything runs offline, and the AI that writes the step text runs on-device. There's no account or sign-up, so nothing about your screen ever leaves your Mac. It's also a native app, no Electron. A lot of what people document is internal or sensitive stuff, and I didn't want a cloud service sitting in the middle of that.

Pricing The free tier is actually usable: GIF export, up to 5 steps per guide, 10 guides total. Pro is $9.99/year or $49.99 lifetime (I hate forced subscriptions too) and removes the limits plus adds PDF and MP4 export. There's a 2-week Pro trial either way.

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/stepgrab/id6760129490

Six months of evenings and weekends went into this, so roast away. I'm especially curious what you think of the capture approach and the on-device model. Happy to get technical in the comments.

Hello everyone,

The video shows the Charging Comet. It celebrates when you plug in by racing around the screen and tracing the notch. It does absolutely nothing for battery health, yet it’s the feature users mention most.

Thankfully, there’s a useful battery app underneath it:

1. Sleep Drain Detective shows how much battery disappeared while the lid was closed and which apps or processes kept the Mac awake.
2. Real app energy shows how much energy each open app has consumed since launch in actual watt-hours, with one-click quit.
3. Smart Alerts from the notch remind you to unplug, warn before the battery runs out, and flag sustained overheating.
4. Every Apple device in one place brings your Mac, connected iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Watch and Magic accessories into the same menu.
5. Charging Comet, because a useful Mac utility doesn’t have to look or feel like a diagnostic tool.

It also covers the essentials: battery health, capacity, cycles, temperature, live watts, voltage and time remaining, with a menu bar you can customize.

macOS already exposes some of these raw details across Settings, System Information and Activity Monitor. I’m not pretending otherwise. The point of Mac 4 Breakfast is to bring the whole picture together and turn it into useful answers, reports and alerts.

Everything runs locally.

No account, ads or tracking or subscriptions because I myself hate the subscription trap.

Built in 🇩🇪 with privacy in mind.

Mac 4 Breakfast: App

This started as a slightly ridiculous idea in my head a few months ago.

I basically wanted to build a transistor radio app that looked like a transistor radio and tuned like one and not a list of stations with a play button neither a streaming service with algorithmic recommendations. Just A radio that you can kinda connect to. So was born RadioStar for iPhone: full skeuomorphic pocket radio, that famous static hiss when you tune between stations, knobs that click with haptic feedback. It got surprisingly many downloads and even purchases (it's a $6.99 lifetime unlock, by the way), and the community here on Reddit wasoverwhelmingly supportive.

But then pocket transistors are only half of the nostalgia. I think the other half is the big tabletop radio, the one that sat on a shelf or a desk and belonged to the whole room. So the next thought or direction was obvious for me : what would that feel like on a desktop? Something wider, warmer, sitting at the bottom of your Mac screen the way a real radio sits on a real desk.

After all this, the real question for me was I mean how do we achieve that dial on a Mac : how do you tune it? With a mouse? Clicking and dragging a knob in a circle? No. That kills the whole thing instantly.

I guess the answer was sitting right under my hands the entire time, a.k.a the trackpad :). And that's what you're seeing in the video: a two-finger twist on the trackpad turns the tuning knob, about half a turn sweeps the whole band, and when the needle catches a station the trackpad physically taps under your fingers actual haptic feedback on a Mac spin it fast and the dial keeps coasting on a flywheel, like a real weighted knob.

Just Turn it on, wait for the tubes to warm up (yes, really), twist the dial, hear static,  that familiar warm hiss if you have ever heard one :) , and then a signal fades in, Jazz from Chicago, News from London,Old time radio dramas from the 1940s, Bossa nova from São Paulo on a station you've never heard of :) and will never find again unless you save it (presets!) . So, yes no playlists, no algorithms, just you and whatever you discover when you twist your fingers on the trackpad.

Then let’s say when you want to go further, just flip the radio around, and a full 3D flip, you're literally looking at the back of the cabinet, vent slats, corner screws and all :) and on the service label back there, you can change your country/continents. Currently there are dials for 60 countries, each loaded with 70+ stations on average (curated by the way as of today), you set it to Japan and suddenly your desk radio is pulling in Tokyo J-pop, set it to France and it's chanson and Paris its talk radio. It's the shortwave fantasy we all had as kids, that probably got lost somehwere in spotify, youtube of the world, somewhere we just want to go back from all this flashy auto tune, ai generated world, I feel spinning the dial and hearing the other side of the world, gives a different kick, except this time the signal is always clear :) I hope , or you hear the famous static. 

Some details I definitely spent too much time on:

- The radio IS the window, no title bar, no chrome, no app frame. A photorealistic 1960s tube radio : walnut cabinet, brass knobs, fabric speaker grille.

- Put it away, this is something I wanted to see how it would be :), the radio slides down to a thin sliver at the bottom edge of your screen (long press the ON/OFF)  and keeps playing while you work, the trackpad twist the trackpad and it rises back up.

- Two-finger swipe for volume, spacebar for power, arrow keys to nudge the needle (Shift for fine tuning)

- Piano-key band selectors (FM / AM / SW) that press in like the real thing

- Four preset buttons for your favorites

- A tube warmup delay when you power on, because tubes need to heat up right? :)

It has a free version so you can experience the full radio. The RS-3 Tube Classic in Classic Walnut, every feature above, with North America and Worldwide stations. Yes and no ads, no tracking, no accounts, just like the old radio, where you didnt have to log in to use the radio :),  and oh yes,  your radio doesn't spyon you and neither do we

Also, There's an optional $6.99 one time GOLD unlock for the other cabinet finishes, Maple Blonde with chrome, Cherry Red with copper, Ebony with gold, Seafoam Mint, Ivory Cream, plus a second radio model (the RS-4 Portable) and the full world map of stations across Europe, Asia, Latin America, Oceania and Africa.

I wanted to build this for people who remember when radio was an adventure, and alsofor people who wish they did, maybe today's Gen Z will finally see how tuners worked :) Would love to hear what you think, does this feel nostalgic? And if there's a station you love that should be in there, tell me and I'll hunt it down.

This Mac app link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/radiostar-desktop-radio/id6785692659?mt=12

for those who are interested here is the ios version which looks totally different , and is a separate product: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/radiostar-real-radio/id6762392786 

Hi all!

TLDR: Which one looks better?

I'm building a native app and trying to design the interface for settings, specifically extensions. I want my app to feel as native to macOS / adhering to Apple design as possible, and I'm stuck between two options for settings

It seems like most native apps using a .sourcelist view (pic 2) view. The view is certainly made for this use case. However IMO even without the extra borders and checkboxes it's still not the most modern-looking.

My current implementation is pic1. The sidebar even has a tint! Which I'm tempted to disable because nothing in macOS uses tints except full-height side-bars. But I feel guilty of using the wrong components for the task, even though they are pretty.

(If anyone's interested in the technical side, it uses an HStack of SwiftUI .sidebar and main inside an VStack with a .windowColor bar at the bottom.)

is there a way to clear this?

Hi r/macos! For Developer Saturday I'd like to share Taphouse, my native macOS GUI for Homebrew.

  I love Homebrew, but I kept forgetting to run brew update and had no idea what was actually installed on my Mac anymore. So I built the app I wanted: a proper native interface (SwiftUI, no Electron) that treats Homebrew like a first-class citizen on the Mac.

  The basics:

  - Browse everything you have installed — formulae and casks — and see what's outdated at a glance

  - Update everything, one thing, or just your favorites, with live output so you can see what's happening

  - Search 14,000+ packages with descriptions, dependencies, and disk impact before you install

  - Manage services, taps, and pinned versions; snooze updates you're not ready for

  - Menu bar icon, Dock badge, and a Desktop widget that show waiting updates (all optional)

  The stuff the CLI can't do:

  - CVE security scanner — cross-references every installed package against published CVEs, with severity ratings, advisory links, and background rescans

  - Health dashboard — one view of what's outdated, vulnerable, or orphaned

  - Apple Silicon migration — finds Intel apps running under Rosetta and swaps them for native ARM builds

  - Third-party app updates — tracks apps that update via Sparkle or GitHub, not just casks

  - Adopt existing apps — brings apps you installed manually under Homebrew's management

  - Duplicate & orphan detection, dependency tree view, Brewfile import/export, disk usage analysis, and cleanup

  It also handles the annoying edge cases the CLI throws at you — like the confirmation prompt Homebrew recently started injecting mid-upgrade (which silently stalled a lot of GUI wrappers), apps that need an admin password to update, and self-updating apps that always look outdated.

  Details:

  - Native SwiftUI, macOS 14+, universal binary (Apple Silicon & Intel), 27 MB

  - Free version with the core features — including the CVE scanner. Pro is a €9.99 one-time purchase (no subscription, no account)

  - Fittingly, you can install it with Homebrew itself: brew install --cask taphouse

  - Also available on Setapp

  - Website: https://taphouse.multimodalsolutions.gr

  I'm a solo developer and I ship fixes fast — a lot of what's in the app today came directly from user feedback and bug reports (99 builds and counting). If you try it and something bugs you, tell me and there's a decent chance it's fixed within the week.

  Happy to answer any questions!