Why I Uninstalled Bartender 6 on macOS Tahoe
I've been a paying Bartender customer since the very first version. Through every major macOS release, every upgrade from Bartender 1 to 5, I happily paid for the new license. A clean menu bar was worth it. But after upgrading to macOS Tahoe and Bartender 6, things went south fast. I finally pulled the plug and uninstalled it for good.
The problems
It started subtly. A slight lag when scrolling in Safari. Windows moving with a noticeable delay. Then it got worse:
- Mouse cursor hijacking — the cursor would randomly jump or disappear entirely, as if something was fighting me for control
- Ghost clicks — phantom input events registering without me touching anything
- Keyboard unresponsiveness — brief moments where keystrokes just didn't register
- System-wide sluggishness — scrolling, window management, even Spotlight felt slower
- Menu bar flickering — the Apple menu randomly flashing as if someone was rapidly clicking it
- Endless re-indexing — Bartender would continuously re-index menu bar items, never finishing, eating CPU the entire time
Every single one of these issues disappeared the moment I quit Bartender.
Why this happens
Bartender's approach relies on screenshotting the menu bar to determine where icons are located. On macOS Tahoe, Apple made significant changes to menu bar handling, and Bartender 6 is effectively fighting the OS over who gets to control the display. The result is constant resource consumption, cursor manipulation, and input interference that degrades the entire experience.
The trust issue
Beyond the technical problems, there's the elephant in the room: Bartender was quietly sold to Applause in 2024 without informing users. The new owners added analytics tracking, changed the code signing identity, and published SEO-stuffed blog posts — all before anyone noticed the ownership change.
The version that supposedly fixed the macOS Tahoe performance issues (6.1.0) didn't. Users kept reporting the same problems through 6.3.1. At some point, you stop waiting for a fix and move on.
Moving on
I uninstalled Bartender completely — including the leftover plist files and daemons it leaves behind when you just drag it to the trash:
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.surteesstudios.Bartender.plist
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Bartender
Then I reset its accessibility and screen recording permissions:
tccutil reset Accessibility com.surteesstudios.Bartender
tccutil reset ScreenCapture com.surteesstudios.Bartender
The difference was immediate. My Mac felt like itself again. Scrolling was smooth, the cursor stayed where I put it, and the menu bar stopped flickering.
After years of loyalty and paying for every single version, it's disappointing to see the app deteriorate like this. But honestly, I don't miss it. A cluttered menu bar is a small price to pay for a Mac that actually works.