The Five Coolest MacOS 26 Features People Don’t Know About
It’s been nearly two weeks since WWDC, and most of the major features of macOS 26 Tahoe, from the new Liquid Glass design to the vastly improved Spotlight, have been talked about to death. However, there are some pretty big improvements that haven’t been talked about as much, and some of them are going to be pretty big improvements.
So, in the spirit of our story about barely mentioned iOS 26 features , here are some of the best macOS 26 Tahoe features I barely saw mentioned. Feel free to install Tahoe in a virtual machine if you want to try them out.
Block menu bar icons you don’t need
Apple users may not want to hear this, but there are some things that Windows is objectively better at than macOS. For example, the Windows tray makes it easy to decide which icons you want to hide and which you want to see. Many Mac users turn to Bartender or any of the many alternatives for this very reason: there are apps they don’t want to see that, for whatever reason, don’t offer the option to disable the notification icon.
You may not need an app for this with macOS 26. There’s an option in Preferences > Menu Bar that lets you disable any menu bar icon. Just scroll to the section of buttons labeled Allow in Menu Bar and disable anything you don’t want to see. It works great. Sure, it doesn’t give you a handy extra tray like Bartender does, but at least this option lets you tidy up a bit without installing third-party software.
Better control center control
Until now, Control Center on the Mac was underpowered compared to similar features on the iPhone and iPad. Not anymore.
Customize Control Center on macOS 26, and you can organize the various controls the way you want, and even add widgets from your apps. There are all sorts of potentially useful tools here, so take your time to customize everything to your liking. If you’ve been neglecting Control Center on macOS, this change may finally make it useful.
A real phone app
Mac users with iPhones have been able to take phone calls on their Macs for a long time, and you could even make calls from the FaceTime app. However, it was all a bit clunky, especially when it came to outgoing calls. Tahoe brings a full-fledged Phone app to the Mac, allowing you to view incoming calls, listen to voicemail, and even make phone calls by dialing a number. It’s a long-awaited feature, and it lets you leave your phone in your pocket when you’re working at your desk.
Live events
Live Activities are one of the best iPhone features, adding real-time information to the Lock screen and Dynamic Island. MacOS 26 brings any Live Activities currently running on your phone to the Mac menu bar. This includes Apple’s own activities and activities from top iPhone apps that use Live Activities .
New virtual disk format
Sure, this is a nerd, but it’s also pretty important for anyone who uses disk images or virtual machines. There’s a new virtual disk format called ASIF, coming with macOS 26. According to the Eclectic Light Company , a fantastic blog for those who like to dive deep into macOS features, the new format achieves near-native speeds, meaning copying files from a disk image will be about the same speed as copying them from a directory.
These virtual disks will also scale as you add files, meaning you can set a file for a virtual image to be 100GB, but it will only actually take up that much space if there are files inside. That in itself is a big change. It won’t affect everyone, of course, but it’s nice to see.