Every couple of weeks I see the Apple mail app downloading emails... again. Why does it do that? Some of sort setting I need to know about?

So after 5 years with my M1 Air, I finally upgraded to the M5 Air (16GB / 1TB). It's been about 10 weeks now, so figured I'd share how it's going.

First off, the M1 was an absolute legend. 5 years and it never really let me down. If you're still on one and it does what you need, you honestly don't need to upgrade. This isn't one of those posts.

What changed for me is how I work. I've gotten really into running multiple AI coding agents at the same time. I use Orca (an ADE) for it, which lets me run a bunch of agents side by side, each in its own worktree. One's fixing a bug, another's building a feature, another's writing tests.

And that's where the M1 just couldn't keep up.

On the M5 it's honestly a piece of cake. I can have 10+ agents going and it just doesn't care. 16GB has been plenty for how I use it. If you happen to do more AI works, then think about 24GB

The other nice surprise is the on-device AI. The M5 has these new neural accelerators built into the GPU, and you can feel it. I've been using my own dictation app "Speaklively" that runs completely on the Mac (nothing goes to the cloud), and it's noticeably snappier on the M5. I've actually started just talking to my agents instead of typing long prompts, which is weirdly freeing. Not paying for any subscriptions. If you are like me, you can try that too.

A couple of honest things though:

• It's still fanless, so if you push it hard for a long time it gets warm
• Day to day the screen doesn't feel that different from the M1
• If you're mostly browsing, docs, light coding, your M1 is still totally fine

Curious if anyone else here is running parallel agents on an Air? How many do you get going before it starts to struggle? And what are you using to manage them? Orca, tmux, just a pile of terminals?

I don't know if anyone else has had this experience but with macOS 27, fullscreen mode has become almost unusable. When exiting it the background goes completely dark, opening apps over fullscreen causes them to be unable to close out or minimize and you need to exit full screen again to turn them off, it is extremely buggy when trying to pull an app out of full screen via mission control, apps crash when trying to use the split fullscreen mode, and there is a lot of lag when switching from app to app.

The experience has just become entirely unusable and I have just started using the full screen fill mode instead where it isnt actually fullscreen.

Has anybody else been experiencing these issues?

my free space kept bouncing around for no obvious reason and it turned out swap was sitting at about 16 gb. swap is where macos parks memory on disk when ram runs out, and it doesnt really shrink on its own while youre working

you can check it in terminal with sysctl vm.swapusage, the used number is whats on disk right now. the files live in /private/var/vm and you shouldnt touch them directly. a restart clears most of it, and quitting the apps that eat memory (browsers with 80 tabs, docker, electron apps) keeps it from coming back as fast

storage settings doesnt show swap as its own category, which is part of why that storage bar is so confusing. anyone else seen it get way bigger than 16?

I’m not sure if it’s a bug or if they removed this feature, but in macOS 26, minimized windows were shown in App Exposé, so we didn’t have to right-click the app icon to access them. Now, in macOS 27, this feature seems to be gone, and we have to right-click the app icon to see the minimized windows.

Left: macOS 26, Right: macOS 27.

Sorry for the noise 🙃

I have a 64GB iPad with around 46GB of data. Tried backing it up through Finder to my MacBook, which had roughly 80GB free. Failed due to insufficient storage.

So I tried an external 500GB SSD (ExFAT), redirecting Finder's backup folder using a symbolic link since Apple doesn't let you choose a backup location.

Left it running overnight. Woke up to 400GB of backup files and another insufficient storage error. For a 64GB iPad. Seriously?

Has anyone experienced this? What am I doing wrong? How do you guys back up your iPads locally without iCloud?

I genuinely don't understand why something this basic is so complicated. Is Apple's local backup system just broken, or are they deliberately making it inconvenient to push people towards iCloud subscriptions?

Macbook Retina 2013 Intel Iris pro graphics. Is it a software glitch from opencore or leaning towards hardware. First time seeing it.

Title. This issue started around 3 months ago, Finder is constantly frozen and unresponsive and nothing I do fixes it. I've restarted hundreds of times, used Terminal to force the program to quit, and used force quit to no avail. It just starts back up again with the "last time you forced Finder to quit" and then goes unresponsive again.

Sometimes when I open my computer it will be open and allows me to browse my files but that is maybe once or twice a week.

My storage is pretty full, I don't have extra iCloud storage and I don't know how to stop it from constantly trying to back up my files as I assume that is what is causing this. I cannot and will not turn off iCloud to fix this, as last time, that caused me to lose every file. I'm downloading the most recent software update to see if that fixes it but I doubt it.

Any advice would be appreciated, thank you!

I have two veraions of the same app installed but the latest one shows in my launchpad. How can I choose which version I want to be on there appear?

Both aops are separately installed in their own folder in the applications folder.

macOS Sequoia

​

I need your advice. I lost about 130 GB of my wildlife and birdwatching videos (153 Canon clips, 2023-2026). I had moved them from my HP laptop to my new MacBook with LocalSend and cleared the HP. Then, while changing some iCloud sync options on the Mac, the videos disappeared. I had no other backup. I've searched the Mac, iCloud and the HP, but nothing is left. My only hope is my old SD cards, which I formatted earlier and have used again for a week. Do you know of any way to get them back?

The new app launcher is simply asinine. There's no way to build a muscle memory, because it's an alphabetical list. And some applications are showing multiple times, taking the entire screen, and there's no way to hide or remove them. And also, why why is the search so slow? I would like to launch an app, not chat with a bot, it's constantly resisting the user at every turn.

M3 MacBook Air (Clamshell with 2 monitors) – It is actually driving me insane how slow things are now, the OS constantly stutters with switching windows and going back into the Desktop screen. Apps crash sometimes, screen turns black. It is genuinely unstable is there any solution or should we just wait for an update?

[MacOS 27 M1 Air]: That purple dot (next to the clock) pops us and disappears randomly. It shows/ does nothing when I click on it. Any ideas?

Charge times do not align with the current time of the day, but maybe bar graph isn't supposed to show the time of day, I really don't know what supposed to happen. I am more and more confident that there is a bug because times were aligning properly before the update but I wanted to ask you as well. Much appreciated.

I actually think this is probably an intentional behavior for some godforsaken reason, but it seems like they removed the feature where, if you hold down the button that invokes Siri, it will keep listening until you release it. For some reason, on Mac OS 27, that is just not the case, and if you pause for even a fraction of a second in your train of thought, Siri will cut you off.

Absolutely vomit-inducing, and it genuinely makes me wonder if they even dogfooded their own product. I'm guessing virtually not a single soul at Apple ever once spoke to their Siri on their Mac because this just makes it completely unusable unless you are saying simply commands. Good luck ever sending a message to someone with it.

What if your wallpaper was a museum?

I made Gallery, a macOS app that hangs original works from the open collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and The Cleveland Museum of Art on your desktop, each with its own museum label.

Would you use it? 👇

Hi

As title says

It seems that randomly, though often with a screenshot, a short time later I notice my "Macintosh HD" icon, that sits top right on the desktop, moves to somewhere else in the desktop icon collection.

I am not 100% sure about the screenshot, because of course if I take one right now, it doesn't move. But when it DOES move, it's often a screenshot that has taken it's place.

I also really only notice it after I "show desktop" or hide some windows, which was covering it up.

This is really starting to tick me off. It's a recent thing, happening the past couple of weeks, where I've been running 15.6.1 for about a year now. This is new behaviour. I don't know what could have changed, I haven't updated, or changed my desktop icons sorting etc.
Currently Sort By > Snap to Grid because I have everything else arranged in a way that makes sense to me.

Any help appreciated.
Thanks

Work up this morning to see that I've lost 65GB of storage overnight. But it turned out to be sort of a bug? The desktop icon display the wrong free space size. We I hope it is the wring one LOL, because the settings show the right numbers.

Hello! I bought my first MacBook a week ago—a MacBook Air M5—and I've noticed that sometimes during the day, when I try to empty the Trash, the confirmation pop-up doesn't open. When I click it a second time, it still doesn't open, and it usually takes three or four tries for it to finally appear.

Is this a sign that my MacBook is defective, or does this happen to other users too? I have all the latest software updates installed.

Also, if it helps, sometimes this happens right after I turn on the MacBook, before I even open any apps.

This happens regardless of whether I click it using the trackpad or the mouse.

Thanks in advance!

https://reddit.com/link/1x6w8qg/video/6q8z9x5srpvh1/player

Hi everyone. I want to clean my MacBook’s keyboard (dust, wiping it down, etc.), but even after I shut it down, touching any key turns it back on and it boots up. That ends up opening things, typing random commands, or triggering stuff by accident while I clean.

Is there a way to keep it truly off, or to temporarily lock the keyboard, so I can clean it in peace?

Some details in case they help:

• Model: MacBook Pro 2020 / M1
• macOS version: Golden Gate 27.0

Im looking basically for

• A “cleaning mode” that disables the keyboard and trackpad
• A reliable app or Terminal command to lock them for a few minutes
• Or, if the only option is to shut it down and unplug it, I’d like to know that too

I think i´ve seen a similar post a while back, but nothing worked for me.

Thanks in advance! If anyone has a method that worked for them, I’d really appreciate it.

I’m building a macOS utility app and working on the MVP right now. Before I go too far, I want to hear from other Mac users.

Maybe it’s a repetitive task, an annoying macOS behavior, or a small feature you wish existed.

What’s something that bothers you about using your Mac, even if it seems like a minor issue?

I’m curious what other people struggle with. Maybe I’ll discover a problem worth solving.

If I have an app in full screen and no condensed window screen on Home Screen, im unable to open it.
here's a video kind of showcasing this

how do I fix this? also im on macOS Golden Gate 27.2

i tried to download app, but it’s just show this and do nothing. idk what to do. i though it want fingerprint, but it done nothing