The 7th Developer Beta of macOS Tahoe is out just a week after the 6th developer beta. With the expected finalization of macOS Tahoe getting closer and the feedback from the first four developer betas taking shape, a more stable and legible Liquid Glass UI is emerging.
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A user may be prompted to re-enter their Apple ID password after updating, but this is not a widely reported experience. High data write observations persist in Activity Monitor, macOS Tahoe becomes closer to having an RC (Release Candidate) build ready for all supported Macs to update with (and OCLP at some point, too). There are other changes (mostly welcome screen and minor UI glyphs) in DB7.
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macOS Tahoe development timeline
- Up until June 9th WWDC: Internal Testing Only
. - June 9th, 2025: macOS Tahoe Developer Beta 1 – Build 25A5279m
. - June 23rd, 2025: macOS Tahoe Developer Beta 2 – Build 25A5295e
. - July 7th, 2025: macOS Tahoe Developer Beta 3 – Build 25A5306g
. - July 22nd, 2025: macOS Tahoe Developer Beta 4 – Build 25A5316i
. - August 6th, 2025: macOS Tahoe Developer Beta 5 – Build 25A5327h
. - August 11th, 2025: macOS Tahoe Developer Beta 6 – Build 25A5338b
. - August 18th, 2025: macOS Tahoe Developer Beta 7/Public Beta 4 – Build 25A5346a
Other “beta 7” OS releases concurrently:
- iPadOS and iOS 26 (Build 23A5326a)
. - tvOS 26 (Build 23J5346a)
. - visionOS 26 (Build 23M5328a)
. - watchOS 26 (Build 23R5346a)
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Tracking Geekbench 6 Performance between builds
- See Links for: CPU / GPU – OpenCL / GPU – Metal (For the 7th Beta)
Disclaimer: While artificial benchmarks only tell part of the story when it comes to the performance of any device, they still offer some form of insight. Ever since I got my own M4 MacBook Air, I benched it on Geekbench 6 in the same environment.
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About how much the prior DB was writing to disk
I wasn’t the only one who had a sincere concern about the SSD in my 15-Inch M4 MacBook Air, even a LEM reader mentioned how it appeared like heavy wear on the SSD. My suspicions were confirmed, as we have jumped to 10.1 TB lifetime writes to the SSD (up from 9.6 TB according to DriveDX) after installing this Developer Beta, and keeping the new ‘Book mostly shut-down.
Spotlight was the biggest change in the prior developer beta, with some users complaining about many bugs extending from the changes. It seems as though there is more of a lid on the excessive data writes to the SSD, which could potentially be a reflection of how Spotlight was worked on since the previous developer beta. It is also worth mentioning this is an “a” graded developer build.
I’m not fully convinced the issue is solved yet. I’m up to 8.14 GB of data written to the SSD already within 15 minutes of updating to Beta 7, but it’s not nearly as bad as beta 6 was. My 2018 Intel Mac mini on Sequoia 15.7 hits the same data Written to SSD after a much longer uptime. SSDs have a limited amount of writes cycles. I had too much anxiety watching so much data being constantly written, so I kept the M4 Air shut-down most of the time on Beta 6. I think I made the right call! Still, there are spikes..
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Compare to: My 2018 Mac mini takes about three times as long to accumulate the same amount of data writes to its SSD – all the while I write articles on the website and do actual work on there, versus the M4 MacBook Air just idling on macOS Tahoe Developer Beta 6. Developer Beta 7 seems to have more of a lid on this, but there are still random spikes which have me worry. Just when I want to go to bat for DB7 not writing as much as DB6, I lift my head up and see more data written out of nowhere. Now it’s 17 GB.
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