A decade with Bartender showed me how much of a macOS feature it is

For the past 10 years I have been a happy customer of a bartender who sang his praises to anyone who would listen. Unfortunately, macOS Tahoe 26 seems to have broken it beyond repair. Now I’ll just wait for Apple to inevitably make Sherlock their flagship feature, which I can’t believe hasn’t happened yet.

macOS Tahoe 26 apparently broke Bartender beyond repair

As someone who lives with the contradiction of constantly running a small process in the background to try to minimize cognitive load when I can, I’ve always liked Bartender’s main feature: the ability to clean up and organize the macOS menu bar by hiding, rearranging, and controlling which icons are visible and when.

Given how much I’ve always liked its reliability and ease of use, I even endured the privacy uncertainty that resulted from Ben Surtees’ decision to sell Bartender to the Applause Group in 2024.

Then came macOS Tahoe 26, and with it a series of internal changes that completely broke the way Bartender 5 worked. Applause quickly developed and released Bartender 6, and it was clear that they were doing everything they could to make it as reliable as Bartender 5 before Tahoe.

This did not happen.

From random cursor grabs and ghostly interface clicks to reliability issues with reordering and hiding menu icons, from performance and memory issues to constant reindexing of hidden and visible icons that made your Mac’s menu bar go completely, sometimes obsessively crazy, opening Bartender 6 meant starting up a machine that often behaved out of control.

And to be clear, once again yes a lot Obviously, Applause is running as fast as it can and continues to work as hard as it can to make the app work properly given the changes made in macOS Tahoe 26.

But this week, after realizing that the cursor issues I’ve been having for weeks (where the cursors would just stop registering or the system would start clicking and dragging items when I moved the cursor around the trackpad) were also related to opening Bartender, I finally gave up.

And while looking for a replacement, I’ve seen users of competing software complain about different reliability, UX, and other issues.

So instead of going through another grueling experience with another set of problems, I just… gave up. I removed all the menu items that I don’t use or need often (by pressing Command and drag it from the menu bar), and now you wait for the day when Apple inevitably introduces its own Bartender-like feature to macOS.

It’s a real shame to see changes under the hood ruin what was a perfectly useful app, and I understand that it can feel awful to root a standalone app (or even an entire category) to get Sherlock. But the truth is that everyone has a limit to how hard they are willing to fight the operating system just to get their computer to work. I found mine.

Ironically, until macOS Tahoe, I never thought that Apple could be Sherlock Bartender. But now that the system includes its own clipboard manager, advanced keyboard shortcuts, and other special features, I’ll trust my inner Lloyd and hope it has a chance.

Do you have a favorite menu bar management app? Let us know in the comments.

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