About the security content of macOS Tahoe 26.6

(support.apple.com)

133 points | by andor 4 hours ago

5 comments

  • tengwar2 1 hour 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.

    • reddalo 0 minutes 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.

    • jghn 1 hour 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

      • simlevesque 1 minute ago
        You can disable it in the accessibility preferences.
      • illithid0 1 hour 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...

        • hbn 30 minutes 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.
        • trollbridge 1 hour ago
          You can almost turn it off on the 27 beta, and 27 seems to perform a lot better too.
          • flohofwoe 1 hour 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.

            • trollbridge 41 minutes ago
              27 seems superior to 26 in almost every way, although I'm still on a fairly old beta.
            • SanjayMehta 8 minutes 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.
        • lapcat 1 hour ago
          > this is better than nothing.

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

          • etempleton 1 hour 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.
            • lapcat 1 hour ago
              > not quite as good as 25 overall

              Nothing will ever be as good as 25.

              Because macOS 25 does not exist. ;-)

          • Jolter 1 hour ago
            I hear it’s slower? Can you comment on that?
            • lapcat 1 hour ago
              I haven't noticed or heard that it's slower.
          • illithid0 1 hour 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.
      • frizlab 37 minutes ago
        macOS 27 does polish Liquid Glass and make it look passable on macOS IMHO. It was very bad on 26. Comically bad.
      • IdiotSavage 10 minutes 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.
      • Hamuko 40 minutes 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.

    • gokohl 19 minutes 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?
    • embedding-shape 1 hour 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.
    • bouke 32 minutes ago
      The question now is, is 27 sufficient enough of an improvement over 15 to upgrade and tolerate Liquid Glass?
    • ExoticPearTree 1 hour 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.
      • andreasley 1 hour ago
        The bug that led to network connection issues after 49 days of uninterrupted uptime was a bit of a showstopper for me.
    • carra 59 minutes ago
      Are there no versions between MacOS 15 and 26???
      • kylemaxwell 58 minutes ago
        They changed the numbering scheme, so... no, there aren't. Version numbers are now year-based, but previously they were not.
      • hbn 26 minutes 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

    • crossroadsguy 36 minutes 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.
      • gedy 5 minutes ago
        They reduced the radius back to older, smaller size and apps now all apps use a single radius vs the weird 3 different radii in Tahoe. Looks better.
  • embedding-shape 3 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?
    • woadwarrior01 1 hour 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.
    • tombot 3 hours ago
      Apple isn’t friends with OpenAI anymore
    • lapcat 1 hour 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.

    • senadir 3 hours ago
      Apple also hosts a copy of Claude internally in their servers.
      • cromka 2 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).
        • Cider9986 1 hour ago
          Banks are all about security theatre so probably not.
        • pbronez 2 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.
          • ainch 2 hours ago
            Some data is so sensitive it likely has to stay on premises though.
          • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2 hours ago
            Yeah, albeit an increasingly second-rate experience, at least when it comes to Bedrock.
      • bel8 39 minutes ago
        source?
        • mholm 28 minutes 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.
          • MBCook 23 minutes ago
            I know they use it, they host it too?

            That would be a very Apple thing to do.

        • MBCook 25 minutes 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.
  • pjmlp 3 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.
    • snvzz 1 hour ago
      If anything, there's a strong argument to switch to seL4.
    • bluecalm 2 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.

      • acdha 1 hour 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.

        • zbentley 26 minutes 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.

      • zbentley 23 minutes 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.

    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2 hours ago
      “nah bro, all those other developers are just garbage, I am the one person that can write memory safe C”
  • AJRF 3 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?

    • microtonal 1 hour 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

      • cubefox 1 hour 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.
        • acdha 1 hour 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.
    • grahamlee 3 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).
    • DStiego 3 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.

      • AJRF 1 hour ago
        I missed that, thanks for pointing out
    • Tepix 3 hours ago
    • cromka 2 hours ago
      I think it's because it's the first big batch of fixes found at Apple by Mythos.
    • croemer 3 hours ago
      I think that's it?
  • nizbit 3 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.
    • croemer 3 hours ago
      One CVE even lists the same person twice!

      CVE-2026-64691: Ruslan Dautov, Ruslan Dautov