About the security content of macOS Tahoe 26.6

Posted by andor 6 hours ago

Comments

Comment by tengwar2 4 hours ago

15.7.8 is out today as well, with these security fixes: https://support.apple.com/en-us/128071.

For context, there have been issues with MacOS 26 which have led many people to defer upgrading until MacOS 27 is available, and MacOS 15 is the previous version.

Comment by jghn 3 hours ago

> For context, there have been issues with MacOS 26 which have led many people to defer upgrading

For me the issue is liquid glass. Which I doubt is getting fixed any time soon

Comment by illithid0 3 hours ago

Also a liquid glass hater, but for what it's worth, 27 is supposed to make it a little bit better. I would prefer to go back to what I had before I had to upgrade into this horrible UI, but this is better than nothing.

https://www.cultofmac.com/news/liquid-glass-changes-ios-27-m...

Comment by hbn 2 hours ago

I've been running the 27 beta and it fixes so much of the ugliness I hated in Tahoe. Lots of places had toolbars restored, solid areas that indicate where the window can be grabbed. The shitty icon spam in menus is back to sanity. And window corner radii are consistent and less bulbous.

Comment by noname120 2 hours ago

macOS 17 is decisively faster on my MacBook Air M1 16 GB than macOS 26/27 is on my MacBook Pro M2 Max 32 GB. And I don’t mean just the animations themselves but lag/sluggishness/responsiveness in general.

Comment by classified 1 hour ago

There is no macOS 17.

Comment by iknowstuff 56 minutes ago

Slower than 15 though

Comment by trollbridge 3 hours ago

You can almost turn it off on the 27 beta, and 27 seems to perform a lot better too.

Comment by flohofwoe 3 hours ago

You can already turn off most glass effects in 26 via "System Settings => Accessibility => Display => Reduce Transparency".

I had that turned off years ago (for reasons I don't remember), and was wondering what all the fuzz was about when 26 came out because I didn't see much of a difference ;)

IMHO the actual important visual changes in the 27 beta is that rolls back the bizarre oversized corner radius in Finder windows, and they also got rid of the 'every menu item must have an icon' idea.

Comment by trollbridge 3 hours ago

27 seems superior to 26 in almost every way, although I'm still on a fairly old beta.

Comment by SanjayMehta 2 hours ago

It's the first thing I turn off on a new iPhone or iPad. Started around ten years ago in the release which had animated app icons. Induced nausea.

Comment by lapcat 3 hours ago

> this is better than nothing.

Having installed the beta, I think that's the best you can say about it.

Comment by etempleton 3 hours ago

Also on the beta. Agreed. Definite visual and UX improvement over 26, fixing the most egregious issues with 26 implementation of Liquid Glass, but maybe not quite as good as 25 overall.

Comment by lapcat 3 hours ago

> not quite as good as 25 overall

Nothing will ever be as good as 25.

Because macOS 25 does not exist. ;-)

Comment by Jolter 3 hours ago

I hear it’s slower? Can you comment on that?

Comment by Tagbert 2 hours ago

The 27 betas? No, they are generally faster than 26.

Comment by alwillis 56 minutes ago

Definitely not slow.

Comment by lapcat 3 hours ago

I haven't noticed or heard that it's slower.

Comment by Jolter 55 minutes ago

Nice, thanks for that.

Comment by illithid0 3 hours ago

As long as the UI improves and I can ignore all the AI stuff they're starting to push through, that's fine with me, though like many longtime macOS users, I'm not holding my breath for a bug-free experience.

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY 1 hour ago

> AI stuff they're starting to push through

iOS 26 anecdote:

A couple of weeks ago, I had a Baltimore Oriole (a cool-looking bird, not a baseball player) in my yard. They aren't rare, per se, but they are uncommon.

Took my iPhone out to snap a picture, and pressed the camera button. I hadn't used it, since upgrading to 26.

It takes the picture. It's there. I can see it, but it won't let me save it. Instead, it wants to tell me about the cool new voice-activated AI retouch feature. There was no way to save.

I probably could have figured it out, but I was so furious, I just nuked the picture.

Comment by dylan604 2 hours ago

> though like many longtime macOS users

For those of us older than just 10 years of using macOS, the older Apple OSes have instilled within us the desire to never install the X.0 release and wait until at least the X.1 release. The bug-free experience is a myth

Comment by pmdr 1 hour ago

I bought a MBP mainly for the hardware, otherwise I'd have stuck with Linux. OS-wise, the jump from Monterey (which I'd last used) to Sequoia was smooth and still feels that way. I prefer not to notice the OS at all, something that I feel would be hard to do on Tahoe due to all that liquid glass and dumb transparency and animations.

Seriously, who the heck even asked for those?

Comment by frizlab 3 hours ago

macOS 27 does polish Liquid Glass and makes it look passable on macOS IMHO. It was very bad on 26. Comically bad.

Comment by reddalo 2 hours ago

That's the sad thing: Apple decided to leave all Intel macs on broken macOS 26. Very bad on Apple's part.

Comment by IdiotSavage 2 hours ago

I hate the round corners. It's already too much on 15, but way worse on 26. It looks like "Baby's first OS", designed by Fisher-Price.

Comment by hbn 2 hours ago

They reverted this in 27

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liqui...

Comment by ak217 2 hours ago

Love to see this, now if only they could revert the whole shimmering oil slick disaster that is "glass" on iOS (unlike macOS, even if I "reduce transparency", the oil slick effect still appears in many places, in addition to all the spacing issues).

Comment by Hamuko 3 hours ago

Same. It's not the worst thing in the world, at least with Reduce Transparency enabled in the Accessibility settings, but I still don't feel any inclination to upgrade. My personal Mac Studio is macOS 15 and my work MacBook is on macOS 26, and I don't think there's a single thing that I find to be better on the work laptop than on my personal machine.

I might update to macOS 26 in September to be ready to update to macOS 27. Being two versions behind doesn't seem reasonable and I'd rather be on the "Tahoe but less shitty" version than Tahoe itself.

Comment by simlevesque 2 hours ago

You can disable it in the accessibility preferences.

Comment by embedding-shape 4 hours ago

Same thing happens almost every release. I've stopped updating my Mac machine until I see something in the release notes I literally have to have in order to continue doing macOS/iOS builds, otherwise I'm staying on the version I've validated to work, and I know the existing bugs with.

Comment by DavideNL 2 hours ago

A better strategy would probably be to stick with the previous *major* release, but, do install its ("minor") security updates...

Comment by embedding-shape 2 hours ago

> do install its ("minor") security updates

Yeah, I thought so too, but surprise surprise; some months ago one of the "minor" updates "broke" ("upgraded") something that made my CI/CD setup stop working, that's when I dropped the idea that Apple even do "minor" updates anymore.

Comment by gokohl 2 hours ago

I still haven’t upgraded because of the UI issues. Curious though how long we will still see this large amount of CVE. My guess was always that we will see much more robust and secure software now with AI assisted engineering but probably still same amount of hacks. Is there a related law already describing this?

Comment by reddalo 2 hours ago

>have led many people to defer upgrading until MacOS 27 is available

Then there's me, crying in MacBook Pro 2019 stuck on MacOS 15 because 27 won't be available for my machine.

Comment by ExoticPearTree 3 hours ago

26.0 had a very annoying video jitter issue, but that was the first things that I noticed to be fixed in the next 26 release. Other than that, it worked just fine.

Comment by andreasley 3 hours ago

The bug that led to network connection issues after 49 days of uninterrupted uptime was a bit of a showstopper for me.

Comment by bouke 3 hours ago

The question now is, is 27 sufficient enough of an improvement over 15 to upgrade and tolerate Liquid Glass?

Comment by carra 3 hours ago

Are there no versions between MacOS 15 and 26???

Comment by kylemaxwell 3 hours ago

They changed the numbering scheme, so... no, there aren't. Version numbers are now year-based, but previously they were not.

Comment by hbn 2 hours ago

Last year they unified all their OS version numbers to just match upcoming year.

macOS went from 15 to 26

iOS went from 18 to 26

watchOS went from 11 to 26

and so on

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by classified 1 hour ago

No, 26 is the successor of 15. They changed the numbering to year-based.

Comment by crossroadsguy 3 hours ago

Did they un-hardcode the corner radius? I mean were they able to? I mean not that that anyone at this point needs convincing how utterly disgusting incompetent they’re at software.

Comment by gedy 2 hours ago

They reduced the radius back to older, smaller size and now all apps use a single radius, vs the weird 3 different radii in Tahoe. Looks better.

Comment by hbn 2 hours ago

I was shocked to find out the inconsistent corner radii in Tahoe was an intentional design decision. I figured it's so obviously bad that it was just sloppy work. But one of the WWDC session videos bafflingly clarified that it depends on whether the app has a toolbar or not.

https://youtu.be/VqTn9NgiE1s?t=439

I can't imagine how the people who signed off on that were put in charge of design at Apple.

Comment by gedy 1 hour ago

I am fairly convinced this was all designed only in graphic tools, and looked nice in static mockups, like those fake desktops with overlapping small windows widely spaced, etc. The design folks probably all had giant studio displays with plenty of room, etc.

Then the reality of "what about toolbars", "what about dark mode", "what about laptop screens", etc were all afterthoughts and resulted in bolt-on fixes like that.

Comment by TheJoeMan 2 hours ago

This may be a naive take, so if anyone has insight please feel free to share, but across Windows, Mac, and Linux OS's I see many cases of path parsing vulnerabilities resulting in sandbox escapes, code execution, or data access issues. When presenting the user with a file picker or command-line input, is it really needed that the software can handle the full POSIX spec?

I do not see a "typical" user needing to access a path with say a network storage but multiple ../.. and hard and soft symlinks simultaneously. I think "be liberal in what you accept" might need to be revisited for path parsing with some sort of OS-wide single-implementation as an optional feature.

Comment by acuozzo 1 hour ago

> I do not see a "typical" user needing to access a path with say...

Typical users run software written by atypical users.

> some sort of OS-wide single-implementation

How do you propose handling migration? What if someone tries to expand an old archive file containing a now-forbidden path?

Comment by TheJoeMan 50 minutes ago

What I mean is that for “honest” software, built-in to the OS or otherwise, the programmer finds a situation where they take some user-supplied input and concatenate that into a path, and call something like OS.read(). If they want to prevent the user from causing havoc, they now find themselves dealing with path validation in their software instead of calling OS.safeOpen(), which would be a reduced subset of allowed chars?

Comment by SoftTalker 39 minutes ago

If the OS is working properly, the havoc should just result in "permission denied."

If there's a path on the system that the user should not be able to read, that's the job of the OS to handle, not the individual applications.

Comment by catlifeonmars 1 hour ago

How would you enforce a single implementation of path parsing?

Comment by pjmlp 5 hours ago

Map the amount of fixes with "... improved bounds checking...", "...improved memory handling...", "...improved memory management..." into the amount of developer, QA and release management teams salaries per hour, versus other stuff they could be working on, and that gives an approximate value of how using specific languages maps into monetary loss, and why companies are starting to care nowadays, given computers are always exposed to the world network.

Comment by snvzz 4 hours ago

If anything, there's a strong argument to switch to seL4.

Comment by yjftsjthsd-h 19 minutes ago

It was my vague understanding that by the time you implemented all the apis needed to run normal software on top of that, you either have enough apis that different tasks can still compromise each other, or you have shoved everything into a single task with very little isolation between normal user processes. In either case, it doesn't seem like you actually gained so much. What am I missing?

Comment by pjmlp 36 minutes ago

Indeed, however without some regulatory help it Will take its time for such kind of improvements across the industry.

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by bluecalm 5 hours ago

>>, and that gives an approximate value of how using specific languages maps into monetary loss, and why companies are starting to care nowadays, given computers are always exposed to the world network.

You need also factor development time and ease of finding developers willing to work in a specific language. There are other factors like readability of the code (very verbose languages are likely to be worse) and cost of maintenance - languages forcing a lot of abstractions are likely much worse.

Comment by acdha 3 hours ago

> You need also factor development time and ease of finding developers willing to work in a specific language

This even more strongly favors Rust or Swift. Nobody is writing C or even Objective-C in 2026 as a growth language.

Comment by zbentley 2 hours ago

If you just meant apple-targeting developers, then yeah; you're right that those languages are in decline. But if you meant developers in general, I think you'd be surprised how many growth sectors are hiring C programmers. They're often not SaaS tech companies, but they are massive and many are growing. Hardware, industrial control systems, defense/aerospace ... there's a ton there, the spaces in which they hire just don't overlap a ton with the spaces frequented by hacker news. Also, a lot of them aren't US based companies.

I hope that changes over time, since I definitely agree that the downsides of C-family languages massively outweigh the downsides of competitor languages.

Comment by pjmlp 1 hour ago

Which is why WG14 and WG21 caring about security would be quite relevant, but alas, priorities.

C could have gotten slices already in the 90's, the concept already existed in other languages, and even Dennis Ritchie made a fat pointer proposal into that sense.

The others, let see if anything related to profiles actually gets into C++29.

Comment by zbentley 2 hours ago

> very verbose languages are likely to be worse

Citation needed. I don't think there's a correlation there. Over-architected Java spaghetti is verbose and unmaintainable. Under-architected Perl code golf that metastisized is terse and unmaintainable.

> languages forcing a lot of abstractions are likely much worse

Citation needed. C++ has had some very high-level abstractions on top of a low-level runtime for awhile, and plenty of people have decided to use it and hire for it regardless. What counts as an "abstraction" or "forced abstraction" is a very very subjective topic.

Comment by pjmlp 1 hour ago

Even C can be super abstracted, see early 1980-90's business software written in C, with nice stuff like Yourdon Structured Method, leading to over-architected C spaghetti with macros, a decade before Java came to be.

The problem is the lack of interest since Morris worm came to be, to provide better mechanisms in said languages, until governments and key big tech names decided it was time to change existing practices.

Comment by UqWBcuFx6NV4r 4 hours ago

“nah bro, all those other developers are just garbage, I am the one person that can write memory safe C”

Comment by 2 hours ago

Comment by embedding-shape 6 hours ago

Lots of "in collaboration with Claude and Anthropic Research" mentions, no mentions of other labs. I'd assume Apple already had access to whatever the most powerful model is at the various US-based labs, but perhaps not?

Comment by woadwarrior01 4 hours ago

Those were voluntary disclosures by two Anthropic researchers and the security firm Calif. I know one more CVE on the list that was discovered using an AI agent and wasn't disclosed as such. I suspect there are many more.

Comment by tombot 6 hours ago

Apple isn’t friends with OpenAI anymore

Comment by muterad_murilax 5 hours ago

What happened?

Comment by fnord123 5 hours ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/10/apple-openai-lawsuit-trade-s...

Comment by mrtksn 5 hours ago

The gist is, OpenAI hired a high ranking Apple employee who helped other Apple employees get hired by OpenAI and exfiltrate Apple trade secrets in the process.

Allegedly of course.

Comment by makeitdouble 3 hours ago

> high ranking Apple employee

Jony Ive basically works for Open AI (it's more complicated, but it's a good approximation), and has more or less rebuilt a designing team over there.

He's not the central person mentioned in Apple's accusations but that's arguably the central point that's triggering all of this.

Comment by ajmurmann 3 hours ago

Didn't he live Apple a very long time ago?

Comment by danso 2 hours ago

Yes, the high ranking employee at the center of the accusations is not Ive, but Tang Tan, former VP of product design

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8w379e091o

Comment by alwillis 45 minutes ago

He left in 2019 and formed his own company, that did design work for Apple until 2022.

He "took" several Apple employees with him when he left and there's been a steady stream of Apple employees going to OpenAI.

Ive isn’t responsible for all of them obviously, but the articles about lawsuits says there are 400 former Apple employees at OpenAI.

Comment by SoftTalker 34 minutes ago

Sounds like Apple needs to do a better job at being a place where employees want to stay.

Comment by anonymars 3 hours ago

The accusations are pretty wild

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48865294

Comment by lapcat 3 hours ago

> Lots of "in collaboration with Claude and Anthropic Research" mentions

I wouldn't say 4 is lots. The entire list is massive. I haven't counted myself, but someone claimed that macOS 26.6 has the all-time record with 155 CVEs.

Comment by embedding-shape 1 hour ago

Considering that in Feb 2026 (https://support.apple.com/en-us/126348) Claude wasn't mentioned even once, 4 sure sounds like "lots" compared to nothing :) But you're right, it's subjective ultimately.

Comment by claiir 1 hour ago

also “ Using GLM From Z.AI”

Comment by senadir 5 hours ago

Apple also hosts a copy of Claude internally in their servers.

Comment by cromka 5 hours ago

Do they? As in Claude but on premises? Wonder if this is gonna be the solution that e.g. banks will require, exactly like they do now for cloud services (e.g. Azure on premises).

Comment by Cider9986 4 hours ago

Banks are all about security theatre so probably not.

Comment by pbronez 5 hours ago

Pretty extreme solution… you can get Claude models from AWS Bedrock and Google Model Zoo. These are both very helpful for compliance and security, but do require you to have a cloud strategy.

Comment by ainch 4 hours ago

Some data is so sensitive it likely has to stay on premises though.

Comment by cromka 58 minutes ago

That's why banks use Azure on Premises (not sure if other providers offer the same, but the investment bank I worked at did)

Comment by UqWBcuFx6NV4r 4 hours ago

Yeah, albeit an increasingly second-rate experience, at least when it comes to Bedrock.

Comment by bel8 3 hours ago

source?

edit: it seems asking for a source it frowned uppon in this site. And it seems there's no source.

Comment by mholm 2 hours ago

I don't believe it's published anywhere, but it's common knowledge to Apple engineers. I can second the poster's assertion that they run Claude internally.

Comment by MBCook 2 hours ago

I know they use it, they host it too?

That would be a very Apple thing to do.

Comment by alwillis 42 minutes ago

> That would be a very Apple thing to do.

That's something Steve Jobs would have done.

Comment by bel8 1 hour ago

Yeah that's why I asked. It would be one thing to use, another to host.

And it seems nobody has a source so it's just humors as usual.

Comment by mholm 1 hour ago

Yes, they host it on their own infrastructure.

Comment by MBCook 2 hours ago

I don’t know about hosting it internally but a an Apple focused podcast I listen to (Accidental Tech Podcast) has mentioned numerous times in the last few months they’re using Claude heavily. And they know Apple insiders.

Comment by AJRF 6 hours ago

Weird thing to see at number 3 on HN - is there some subtle context I am missing here?

Are we wink winking that it's a lot of fixes?

Comment by microtonal 4 hours ago

It is a lot of fixes and the Android Security Bulletins of June and Android 17 also had a lot of fixes [1], despite ASBs only containing high/critical vulnerabilities (other vulnerabilities are only fixed in major releases and QPRs, which most Android vendors respectively roll out late or never at all).

I think the story here is that vulnerability discovery has accelerated a lot with LLMs, but since are adversaries are doing the same, it is more important than ever to update quickly (and not let some Android vendors get away with their lazy update schedules).

[1] https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/2026/2026-... https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/android-17

Comment by cubefox 3 hours ago

So using newish phones that don't get updated anymore could be a lot more dangerous now than it was just a year ago.

Comment by acdha 3 hours ago

Right - it was always dangerous but people who figured they weren’t important enough to be attacked might find out that LLMs have shifted that cost in the wrong direction.

Comment by grahamlee 5 hours ago

And it's not actually that much information "about the security content". For example: "Impact: An app may be able to access sensitive user data. Description: An access issue was addressed with additional sandbox restrictions." This references CVE-2026-43819, which doesn't have any more information. Compare this with the nearly decade-old https://support.apple.com/en-gb/103680, and you see much more specific information about problems and their remedies (except in situations where Apple's action was to update a vendor component).

Comment by Gigachad 2 hours ago

The vagueness could be intentional. There’s been a big issue with linux where proof of concept exploit code gets posted before the bug is announced because people reverse engineer it from the fix commits.

Apple has the advantage that they can keep everything secret for long enough for the patches to roll out. And realistically there is no reason the user needs to know the details of an exploit that was patched before it was ever used.

Comment by DStiego 6 hours ago

Relevant context might be for example that there are 4 mentions each of Claude by Anthropic and XGPT by ThreatBook, both based on LLMs.

AI attribution might be one reason people are particularly curious.

Comment by AJRF 4 hours ago

I missed that, thanks for pointing out

Comment by cromka 5 hours ago

I think it's because it's the first big batch of fixes found at Apple by Mythos.

Comment by nozzlegear 2 hours ago

Is this speculation? Where does it say Mythos was responsible for any of this?

Comment by cromka 59 minutes ago

It is speculation, which is what I think the upvote count reflects.

Comment by Tepix 5 hours ago

Yes, it's really quite a lot https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/27/ios-26-6-fixes-over-75-securi...

Comment by croemer 6 hours ago

I think that's it?

Comment by FabHK 32 minutes ago

Apropos, anyone else saw "fast user switching" in Tahoe turn into "excruciatingly slow user switching which after a minute of switching without success rebooted the whole damn machine"?

Comment by nizbit 6 hours ago

Collision counts are absurd. CVE-2026-43739 has roughly twenty credited researchers; CVE-2026-43816 has nearly as many. And ai attribution getting credit.

Comment by croemer 6 hours ago

One CVE even lists the same person twice!

CVE-2026-64691: Ruslan Dautov, Ruslan Dautov

Comment by Someone 4 hours ago

> One CVE even lists the same person twice!

Not necessarily. Could be two persons sharing that name. See https://revstat.ine.pt/index.php/REVSTAT/article/view/382

Comment by proactivesvcs 5 hours ago

One of them lists an anonymous person!

CVE-2026-43744: Mathis Mansière, an anonymous researcher

Comment by nkrisc 5 hours ago

It reads as if "an anonymous researcher" is describing Mathis Mansière, which is quite humorous.

Comment by rubslopes 4 hours ago

This reminds me of my favorite segment of the TV show Curb Your Enthusiasm: https://youtu.be/JqrJ4wGid4Y