A Deeper Dive into macOS 26 (Premium)

Last year, I reviewed the MacBook Air 15-inch M3 ahead of the first wave of Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PCs for comparison purposes. I've owned more Macs than I can count, but I wanted to get the mainstream Mac laptop that Microsoft and Qualcomm were targeting. And it was impressive across the board. (Still is.) The performance, battery life, form factor, the whole thing.

Flash forward a year and Apple has announced macOS 26 alongside its other Liquid Glass-based OS updates. I've installed these betas on my MacBook Air, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. But I wasn't sure how to handle the Mac at first. After a bit of back and forth, I decided it was time to just start over and look at Tahoe with fresh eyes.
A macOS multitasking recap
I had a few nitpicks with the MacBook Air last year. My only major issue was related to macOS and its inconsistent multitasking capabilities. In fact, this topic was so vexing, I wrote about it a month before I published my review, differentiating between subjective quirks and the inconsistent interfaces that are objectively worse because they hinder productivity.

In macOS, apps can support an elegant full-screen mode in which each runs in its own space (virtual desktop) and you can swipe between them using three fingers in a horizontal motion with the Mac's touchpad. Unfortunately, full-screen apps don't occupy the full screen; there's an empty black bar at the top and/or the menu bar, depending on how you configure the latter. I suspect this is to accommodate the notch on modern Macs like my Air, but I wish I could override this behavior. Full-screen apps should be full-screen. I'm sure some media apps can do this, but none of the apps I daily can.

That touchpad-based navigation swipe works really well. But because it's limited to spaces, there is a divide between apps floating over the desktop in Finder and those running full-screen. If you're a Windows user and your brain just fired up an old memory, it's likely because that's how Windows 8 worked: The Desktop appeared as if it were its own full-screen app.

What this means is that you can't reach every app using that swipe. You can only swipe between full-screen apps (which are each in a space) and whatever is over the desktop, collectively (all of which are also in a space, called Desktop). Once you're there, you have to use Command + Tab, the macOS version of Alt + Tab, to switch between running apps. (You can also access full-screen apps this way.)

And that's OK, I guess. I can remember two different things. It's just that macOS face-plants when it comes to apps with multiple windows. In Windows, each app window gets its own position in the Alt + Tab list. But in macOS, they do not. Those positions represent apps, and if an app has multiple windows, you have to use whatever options it offers for switching between them. There is a Command + ` shortcut you may want to learn if you aspire to be a Mac power user, for example. But now...