Apple Releases Version 26.4 of macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and HomePod Software

Could you elaborate a little more on the workout section? Does this mean that instead of hitting start, I would just double tap on whatever the workout is and it'll start?

I am thinking that I might just take the plunge with this as there's only so long I can hold off. But, is it any better? Is content still missing in Safari? Is it still not possible to navigate to headings when in the toolbar? I think I read in another post that one major issue has been fixed at least.

Prior to WatchOS 26 I would start a workout by just double tapping the one I wanted from a list. Once 26 came along, the very first time I did this it was the same, but subsequently I now have a dropdown list which I need to flick through and a start button. I'm hoping this update puts it back to how it was prior to 26 as this seemed faster to use.

I've not installed the update yet so might be wrong.

https://apple.news/An8yty91tRqygJY67Nilo4A

I'm so glad the link issue with mac OS is fixed! I got so used to it that I didn't really realize how much it made it lag until they fixed it.

Siri voices are deleted by themselves don't know why. I keep redownloading them but they are automatically deleted. Any idea how to resolve this?

I got a bit reckless and upgraded to MacOs 26.4. I noticed in the rotor there is now a Content Chooser. Is this new to Tahoe? I've never noticed it before but then I don't use the rotor much.

It seems odd and possibly a bit pointless but I'm curious - has anyone found anywhere that it is useful?

In Mail, it gives me a list of my emails, if I'm lucky, or it just says it's loading and never finishes. Which is roughly the equivalent of pressing Cmd+1 but slightly less convenient.

In Outlook, if Mail is selected, it gives me a list of folders like Inbox, Favourites etc. But no matter which one I choose the focus pings off to wherever it wants to go instead.

I did think that maybe the use coes from being able to filter the results like you can with any other part of the rotor only. Except you can't - it just goes ping.

Has anyone found anywhere where this is useful?

This is frustrating as I had been thinking this was maybe fixed in Tahoe but no.

If you navigate to headings and that heading has a child element in it of any kind, then VoiceOver speaks the number of items and not the heading text. This was broken in Sonoma and it's really, really annoying.

Wait what? I swear headings were fixed. I haven't updated yet to 26.4 I think. Will keep you posted.

Oh OK - I must have just skipped past it before. I wonder what it is for. What ounts as content? Maybe the intention is that it's item chooser but it ignores toolbars, sidebars and whatnot. But from my play it didnt' seem to do anything useful.

A couple of observations after upgrading the watch.

Firstly, I was wrong - starting a workout is the same as before, I have no idea what this change is, then, as it all looks the same to me.

Secondly, and I'm sure this is going to be just me, but I am finding it weirdly difficult to get the time. So I raise my wrist and tap the screen and now I almost always miss and hear "watch widget microphone" or "actions available instead".

I suspect I know the answer to this question - but is anyone else noticing this or is it the same as it's always been and I've just got more clumsy over night?

I've exactly the same issue after updating to 26.4. To be precise, now VO reads the first complication instead of time when the screen wakes up. So if I remove all the complications from my clockface, or choose one, that has no of them by default, VO reads time as expected. But such settings makes my clockface almost useless.

I might be wrong about this, but prior to this version I would tap anywhere on the watch to take it and it would say the time. I think now it is possibly responding to the part of the watch that I tapped which might well be a complication. So I think with a bit of practice it's possible to get the time. straight away if you tap in the right place. I am finding f I tap to the middle right I usually get the time. Similarly, if I tap bottom right I get the status of my rings.

There is some sense to this if you can be conscious of where the complications are exactly. My gut reaction to this was that they had broken the single most important part of a watch. But I am wondering now if it is just going to take a little time to adapt then maybe it is more flexible and it might allow us to get to other complications more quickly.

Using watch 9, and if I tap on the watch 2 times, I get the time and haptics. Always get the haptic even if I touch the watch. Bug about that. If I slide to messages no issues or notifications on watch. Looks like it is working for me. Next week I am getting the 11. Long live cats. Wish me luck with setting it up.

It seams strange, but I'm currently having a different behavior. Independent where I tap the screen, VO always reads the first complication, it even reads the same if I set waking the screen by raising the wrist.

I am getting a weird bug, wondering if anyone else is getting this. I don't hear anything when I interact with a table in Pages via VO+shift+down arrow. Like literally no speech and after interacting (I assume) I don't hear anything when I try to navigate... Very strange.. Anyway maybe it is just me and I am crazy, or maybe I am just crazy anyway....

Edit:
Actually it does say 'in table name', but after that I can't navigate or hear anything about the cells and their contents

I think this is a temporary one off I occasionally have it too though very rare, restart voiceover / pages and the mac in this order and let us know here if you still experience it. I'll update to .4 as well tomorrow and see for myself. I hope you're just unlucky though this is easily a very bad one in the s-tear next to things like snr, cause blind users then lose access to a ton of content overnight with the update.

This might not be new to 266.4 and I think some of this has been reported before, but a few things I've noticed:

The Siri voices seem to work much better with VoiceOver, in that they don't drop to a rate of 1 when saying individual letters and numbers.

However there is some weirdness too.

I use Irish Siri voice 2 for Siri. Yesterday I added it to my voice rotor, and also created an activity for it. (OK I admit I am a sucker for that accent)

Today my voice rotor included US Siri voice 4. This might have been there before. But my Irish voice was missing and there was a blank option at the end of the list. In the settings menu, the Irish voice is still being showing as an additional voice.

I deleted the US Siri voice. However it still appeared in the menu (but when selected used my Primary voice instead). Restarting VO made it disappear. Still no Irish voice though. Switching to my Irish activity also did not switch the voice. I went back into VO Utility and deleted it from the voices list, then went to add it back in. It showed as already being installed, but when I went to add it, the preview option remained silent and it doesn't work. I can't see how I can delete it entirely and redownload?

The other thing I noticed which might be a bug but I prefer it, is that my login screen now has a US voice - I suspect it is Samantha - instead of Daniel. This is an improvement as far as I am concerned as I can't stand Daniel but not sure it is on purpose.

Oh, I restarted VoieOver and now the more actions thing does have an option to delete the voice, so at least I can start over.

One thing I noticed - whnen it was broken and I tried adding it to my additional voices list again without redownloading, the dialog had options at the bottom - something like Personal Option 1 and Personal Option 2 or something. I wonder if it had got confused and thought it was a personal voice or something? Now I've redownloaded and selected it again that dialog does not have those options.

OK I was talking total rubbish - if I touch the watch and it is asleep then I will always get watch widget microphone and not the time. I think when I was testing before I was maybe waking it by raising my wrist.

I've noticed that the standard file open dialog boxes have gone a bit weird with Tahoe. I'm guessing it's not new in 26.4 but could be.

It seems quite hard to find the actual list of files/folders. I think it's moved to the far left maybe which seems weird. But if I move to it, it doesn't seem to automatically interact - I can't use up and down arrows to select things or type file or folder names. I can interact with it and then try to use VO keys to find my way which is extremely tedious. Or I can restart VoiceOver and then it works properly.

I've noticed it when inserting an attachment in Outlook and elsewhere. I am pretty sure it isn't an Outlook thing.

Anyone else?

Does anyone else find that on Tahoe, the Mac will just constantly blurt out that such and such an application has opened a new window, even when that application is well and truly buried in the background? It's not all the time, but it is very noticeable sometimes. I thought it was a PyCharm bug but it's not the only culprit.

But then, let's face it, Tahoe is a bit of a step backwards for the Mac again isn't it?

I'm honestly not sure when this started, but it seems as though I've been dealing with this issue for ages; I seem to recall it may have even happened with my original apple watch, but it's gotten a lot worse recently. At least once a day, my Apple Watch Ultra 3 just starts randomly yelling out "notification Center" over and over and over again. I have no idea what is triggering this, but the only way to make it shut up is to cover the entire watch face with my hand for a few seconds, and then everything is normal until the next time it decides to exhibit the same weird/annoying behavior. Has anyone else experienced this, and if so, have you found a way to prevent it from happening? Thanks!

Hi Missy Hoppe,
Could it be that you are accidentally turning the Crown on your Apple Watch, and triggering the Notification Screen?
Sometimes the Rotary Crown will rub on my wrist and trigger a response from VO.
HTH
@SeaNoEvil00

For ages on the Mac, if I have a long calem/Pascal cased string such as SomeReallyLongPascalCasedString when I use option_left/right to read the whole word, VoiceOver will speak out its letters instead of reading it. This has always been pretty annoying. I did find that Eloquence did not have this problem but other voices do.

In Sequoia it was partially fixed. In the case mentioned above it would read the words properly, but in some other cases it still spoke it out letter by letter. Anyway it was much better.

But now in Tahoe it's exactly as it was before. Only now Eloquence has also disappeared so I don't have that fallback.

I haven't yet gone full-on rant about how bad Tahoe is but it's brewing at least.

I think I mentioned this in an old post somewhere about tahoe. Can confirm :(
Usually in the .4s it should get better, not worse!

I came from the last Sequoia directly to Tahoe 26.4. I haven't noticed any fixes since Sequopia and I have noticed that there are a number of new bugs.

Safari has got so much worse. It regularly can't load content. The other day I was getting so far into an oauth process and I just couldn't finish it no matter how many times I tried. I ended up using VOCR and lo and behold there was the content. (Side-note: VOCR has got a lot worse if you don't use an LLM. It's a real battle to let it just OCR a screen like it used to. I must report this sometime)

Safari has become borderline unusable at times, particularly with Jira. I've had to switch back to Chrome for many things. Chrome is mostly better at the moment, but we all know how quickly that can change. Chrome was decent towards the end of Sonoma, not so much in the early days of Sequoia.

I've also noticed that the VO cursor gets stuck more often in Safari and Chrome and needs to be wiggled about to get to where you need to go. Getting from the address bar to the web content has always been challenging but it seems worse now. I'm constnatly pressing Cmd+L, hammering Esc then trying to find where th ehell the headings have gone. It feels very much like I am just hammering my fists on my keyboard in frustration.

I've had a number of problems in Mail where I've just been unable to get back to the message list. In Sequoia pressing cmd+1 was a reliable way to get back to the start but often it just doesn't work in Tahoe and I end up just fighting with it.

Another small thing but if you disable VO groups a number of dialogs now require you to interact with them to get to buttons which wasn't the case before.

Text editing seems a bit less reliable - particularly in Safari, also in Outlook and sometimes other editors like BBEdit. I can't quite put my finger on it but just lots of little things that just mean I have to restart VOiceOver just to restore some sanity. For example, I think it was Safari but might have been Outlook, but I was typing things in and it was just announcing "a" over and over again, or "s" and I had to keep restarting VoiceOver just to know what was going on.

And not related to VoiceOver, but possible since 26.4.1 I've noticed that touch ID doesn't work most of the time and I am forced to enter my password a lot more than before.

The Safari problems are probably the only showstoppers, but Apple definitely has made the overall experience more frustrating overall.

I've not noticed any new improvements at all since Sequoia. I've not used any of the new features. i was interested in the spotlight changes but honestly I've not actually done anything new with it at all.

I had been hoping that the navigate by headings bug would have been fixed but it definitely hasn't.

It's a shame I was too cowardly to upgrade before the Applevis Report Card had to be completed.

I need to spend a day or two reporting all this stuff to Apple. The Safari changes are quite tricky though as most of the time I'm using private web apps.

There's nothing that can't be worked around, but it is just an overall increase in the seemingly endless number of hacks that need to be done just to achieve anything remotely productive.

Hi! I appreciate the theory, and I can remember, especially with my original watch a number of situations when I would accidently press the digital crown, but I don't think that's what's going on here. It happened at work today. I was standing up, moving books from one shelf to another and my watch just started saying notification center over and over. Also, if the screen is off, I don't think that accidentally turning the crown would do anything; I don't have the always on feature enabled. I appreciate the theory, though.

Wow.
Honestly, how do any of you folks on macOS get any work done at all? 🙂‍↔️

Well, I know if I was using Windows I would never have to do any hacky workarounds at all because it's always perfect all the time. :)

I know this might be controversial, but recently I've been doing quite a bit of vibe coding and now have my own apps for accessing bitbucket, jira and, to a lesser extent, Amazon Web Services. And using thee does mitigate all the problems with Safari. I don't really trust any browser on the Mac to stay stable and I don't trust any web app to stay usable, so this gives me a bit more control over it.

Things are a lot better if you avoid web browsers. Don't get me wrong, it's always a battle and you always feel like you are being poked by a sharp stick, but I think there are things to like about the Mac and if Apple could ever get a grip on the bugs then it would be nice.

Anyway let's not start another Mac vs Windows debate here, but I think it is fari to say both platforms have pros and cons.

But I can't put it into words suitable for a friendly web site like this to fully express how frustrating the Mac is to use at times. Quite often it feels like death by a thousand cuts. Then something relatively minor like "PyCharm has opened a new window" when you're not even using it can suddenly push you over the edge.

I have an M1 iMac running MacOS 26.4.1 and have noticed that zoom cuts out like it has been switched off rather than zooming out with a short cut key. You immediately go to full screen without the display zooming out. I thought it was a problem with my Magic Trackpad, but I switched to my magic mouse and it is still happening, so nothing wrong with the hardware.

Zoom has been rock solid all the time I have owned a Mac. I have had an Intel Mac since 2010 and never had zoom problems before now. This problem only started with 26.4.1.

Has anyone else experienced this?

No worries. I was not trying to start a Mac versus PC debate. I was simply asking how One gets around all of the issues that are currently plaguing macOS?

As far as how users get around all of the issues that are currently plaguing macOS, I'd imagine there are as many answers to that question as there are members on this forum. Different users have different use cases, and thus not all bugs affect all users equally. For me, as someone who uses macOS as my daily driver and have a Windows PC on the side, I've always found macOS and Windows equally frustrating in different ways, ways I won't elaborate on here to avoid starting another Mac versus PC debate.

I have the message pane of Mail disabled, the splitter on the right says collapsed. So if I want to see a message, I have to hit enter on it. Then cmd-w to close it. So I can just arrow through the messages table. Closing a message puts me right back into the table.

So there's another one of those ways of working. I'm sure it's not for everybody but it works for me and I don't know that I've run into any issues with Mail getting stuck somewhere or other. So that's something to try, in case it might help.

Fair enough. For the record though I was never trying to start a Mac versus PC debate. I was genuinely asking a question, based on a users experience with a recent update to their copy of macOS. 🤷

Face it, Brian. You love causing mischief! So far as I'm concerned, and I will likely get a mild scolding for this off topic moment, It's OK with me if you choose to own it. Smile.
Bruce

Thanks for the suggestion - I do tend to use Mail this way. I don't really see the point of having to move back and forth between the left and right sides when you can just open and close a window. I've not tried closing the right hand side altogether though. That might be worth a try as I rarely use it.

I would say this doesn't happen often in Mail - just one of those things that happens when you are trying to get something done in a hurry and it totally throws you.

I've found a reliable (but not very helpful) fix for the disappearing Irish siri voice problem:

1. Set aside a few hours to prepare a bug report for Apple.
2. Try to reproduce the problem so you can capture a log.

That pretty much guarantees that it will work, it seems. And no doubt tomorrow morning when I don't have time to do it, the voice will have disappeared again. But that's 2 out of 2 times this has happened.

And I complained above that VOCR wasn't working well for me these days, and I think I have maybe found an actual workaround. I saw there was a beta of v3 of the app, so I installed it. I was having the same thing happen where it would either OCR or try and fail to use an LLM seemingly at random. In v3 there is a preset manager and I noticed that ChatGPT was the only thing in the list, so I deleted it. Now so far it seems to work properly.

I was actually filling in a bug report on github at the time, and Safari went into a Not Responding spiral of doom, and it was only because it completely killed everything that I spent a bit more time looking into the problem.

I can't believe how bad Safari is these days.

Oh OK I think that potential fix for VOCR might not be actually working.

Instead of the ChatGPT error it makes that little beepy noise as if it's worked, but then VoiceOver does not announce that it has captured the screen and the follow-up keys don't work. Repeat a few times and it changes and does work.

I think VOCR is one of these apps that's got a little carried away with this whole AI thing and forgotten about the basics. It's a great app but it seems to get a little more complicated and a little less reliable with each release, sadly.

And yes my Irish siri voice did' get corrupted when I booted up this morning. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.