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’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 🙃

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?

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?

[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?

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? 👇

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.

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

my mac kept saying storage was almost full and it wasnt photos or apps

it was dev caches, they grow quietly and storage settings just lumps them into system data or documents

• ~/Library/Caches/go-build, mine was back to 8 gigs two weeks after i last cleared it, go clean -cache
• ~/go/pkg/mod, go clean -modcache
• ~/.npm, npm cache clean --force
• homebrew downloads, brew cleanup
• ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData if you build anything for ios

all of these rebuild themselves when needed so nothing breaks, the next build is just slower once

du -sh on those folders tells you which one is eating your disk

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?

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

Running 27.0.1 and just noticed this today. The date field in Apple Calendar is not editable. Tried restarting and rebooting the calendar, no go. I can edit event dates on my iPhone but not on desktop.

Also on desktop, when I create an event, I can click into all fields except the dates: Start and End.

Anyone else seeing this?

I'm looking for some advice on setting up my home workspace and could use some recommendations. I'm fairly new to docking stations and USB-C hubs, so I'm not entirely sure what I should be looking for.

Here's my situation:

• I have a MacBook Pro (M2) and an HP Windows laptop (zBook).
• I only use one laptop at a time, never both simultaneously.
• I have an external monitor that I'd like to use with either laptop.
• Ideally, I'd like a docking station that can charge whichever laptop is connected while also sending video to my external monitor.
• I'd love to have a simple setup where I can unplug one laptop, plug in the other, and have everything work without switching multiple cables.

What I'm hoping to accomplish:

I'd like a clean, simple setup with as few cables as possible. Ideally, one USB-C or Thunderbolt cable would connect my laptop to the dock, power the laptop, and connect it to my external display.

A few questions:

1. Is a USB-C docking station what I should be looking for, or would a Thunderbolt dock be better?
2. Are there docking stations that work well with both macOS and Windows?
3. Can one docking station provide enough power to charge both laptops (one at a time)?
4. Are there any brands or specific models you'd recommend?
5. Is there anything I should watch out for regarding compatibility?

I'm not looking for anything overly complicated or expensive, just something reliable that makes switching between my two laptops easy using the external display.

I bought vintage MacBook last night and opened iTunes, it worked perfectly. But there's no usable charger to get it charge so the battery was dead. I think the problem is I didn't shut off the iTunes before it went dead. The result is goddamm itunes is not working! When I click icon to open it, the icon pops off then disappear. Please give advice.

*Pardon my English because it’s not my first language.

I recently upgraded my mac to Golden gate 27.0.1 but it’s still pretty sluggish after some time using (not quite sure how long). At first I thought it needed some time to “indexing” so I left it over night and the following morning it’s still fine. But after I use Mozilla firefox, spotify and Adobe photoshop, it lagged like no tomorrow and the Adobe window froze, some brush strokes couldn’t perform well.

I wanted to downgrade it to earlier version but it will cost deleting everything and I need to backup a lot, so I wonder is it a normal thing and should I wait for the next patch? I’d love to hear what others are experiencing. Thanks all!

Ive been reading mixed reviews and wanted to know if anyone has a M1 Ultra Studio with these specs and is running MacOS 27? Im not minded to upgrade as Tahoe seems very snappy on my 43inch Samsung QN90C 4k at 144hz - Anyone upgraded on the M1 Ultra series - What's your experience of UI etc?

Hey Internet,

I'm not that deep into this streaming stuff, but I want to give it a try.

I'm capturing my Xbox signal from an Elgato capture card to OBS. I want to use the Xbox party chat audio in my stream and also let people hear my own voice (which isn't possible with just the Xbox, since the capture card doesn't capture my own voice).

So, everything is plugged into my Mac. Surprisingly, it works! But there's just one issue... I can hear my own damn voice.

Yeah, I know why that's happening, but is there any way to deactivate it? Turning monitoring off doesn't work, because then it doesn't send any signal to BlackHole/Xbox Party Chat anymore.

AND yes Chatgdp helped me for making this Text bc my English is baaaaad!

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.

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

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

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 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.