When Apple first released macOS Tahoe, I was eager to install it on my M2 MacBook Air. Over the years I have generally had positive experiences with major macOS upgrades, and although there have occasionally been bugs here and there, I cannot recall a situation where a new version of macOS performed poorly enough that I seriously considered reverting to an older release.

That changed with Tahoe.

What made the experience particularly strange was that I had previously used several beta versions of Tahoe and found them to perform reasonably well. They were not perfect, but they felt responsive enough for everyday use. By the time the final release arrived, however, something had changed.

On my M2 MacBook Air with 8 GB of RAM, Tahoe felt noticeably slower than the beta versions I had been testing. Applications took longer to respond, switching between windows felt less fluid, and the overall experience simply did not feel like what I had come to expect from Apple Silicon. The performance remained no different once I disabled some of the graphics features that were introduced in Tahoe: Liquid Glass.

The situation became frustrating enough that I did something I had never done before on a Mac: I rolled back to the previous version of macOS.

What made the situation even more puzzling was that I was also using Tahoe on my work-issued MacBook Air. Aside from having 16 GB of RAM instead of 8 GB, the systems were nearly identical. It was no surprise that on my work machine, Tahoe performed perfectly well. It wasn’t the revolutionary leap in performance that Apple marketing would have you believe, but it was stable, responsive, and perfectly usable for day-to-day work.

The experience left me wondering whether Apple had quietly crossed a threshold where 8 GB of RAM was no longer sufficient for the workloads many users expect from a modern laptop.

Fast forward to about a week ago and I decided to give Tahoe another chance after reading that Apple had made significant improvements to Tahoe.

To my surprise, the experience has been completely different.

Whether it is the result of subsequent updates, bug fixes, memory optimizations, or a combination of all three, Tahoe now feels remarkably smooth on my 8 GB MacBook Air. The sluggishness I experienced after the original release appears to be largely gone. Applications launch quickly, switching between windows is fluid, and I am once again able to use the machine in the same way I did before the upgrade.

My typical workflow is not particularly light. I tend to have multiple applications open simultaneously, along with numerous browser windows and tabs. This was the type of workload that seemed to overwhelm the machine during my first experience with Tahoe, yet today it handles the same workload without much complaint.

There has only been one notable exception so far.

During one particularly heavy workload, I apparently exhausted the available memory on the system. Rather than freezing completely, macOS presented a dialog informing me that memory resources had been exhausted and offered the option to close applications while allowing suspended applications to resume later. While not ideal, it was far preferable to the system becoming completely unresponsive.

One factor that may be contributing to the improved experience is that I am not actively using Apple Intelligence. It is possible that users who rely heavily on those features may encounter different results, particularly on systems with only 8 GB of RAM, however, for my own usage patterns, the operating system has been performing surprisingly well.

It is still early, and a week of usage is hardly enough time to deliver a definitive verdict. My current impression is far more positive than it was when Tahoe first launched.

If anything, this experience serves as a reminder that operating systems continue to evolve significantly after their initial release. Sometimes the version that ships on day one is not necessarily representative of the version users will be running six months later.

For now, at least, Tahoe has earned a place back on my MacBook Air.

So far, so good.