macOS Tahoe Features a New Recovery Assistant

If your Mac experiences an issue that prevents it from starting up properly, macOS Tahoe includes a new Recovery Assistant that can attempt to identify the issue and resolve it, according to an Apple support document published this week.

Recovery Assistant for Mac Feature
If your Mac experiences certain behaviors during startup, Apple says the computer might automatically restart and open Recovery Assistant. To use the utility, click on the "Continue" button in the window and follow the on-screen steps.

When the recovery process is complete, Recovery Assistant will indicate that it recovered your Mac successfully, or that it was unable to recover your Mac, or that no known issues were found. Click on "Restart Mac" to complete the process.

If your Mac starts up successfully, Apple says you might be notified to recover your iCloud data.

If your Mac does not start up successfully, it has an issue that Recovery Assistant cannot resolve, and you can then move on to other troubleshooting steps.

Recovery Assistant is also available from the Utilities menu in macOS Recovery mode.

As we reported on earlier this year, iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 add a similar Recovery Assistant tool to the iPhone and iPad, and Apple published a support document this week with more details about how the feature works on those devices.

Related Roundup: macOS Tahoe 26
Related Forum: macOS Tahoe

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Top Rated Comments

ApAx Avatar
5 weeks ago
Apple: "We made a tool that may or may not run and may or may not fix an issue you may or may not have, and when that may or may not happen, good luck!"
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Apple Knowledge Navigator Avatar
5 weeks ago
Will it recover the corner radius’ and pathetic lines everywhere?
Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)
!!! Avatar
5 weeks ago
Reminds me of the stupid Windows diagnostic assistants that never actually solved any problems. The fact that Apple now uploads a ton of data, which is presumably a sysdump and includes insane amounts of personal info, reminds me of the Windows 10 spyware, and how it will "collect data" about a process if you try to force-quit it.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Sippincider Avatar
5 weeks ago

Reminds me of the stupid Windows diagnostic assistants that never actually solved any problems.
Or the Classic MacOS "Error type 11" screen that didn't help either.

Maybe they can bring back the cannonball icon with the lit fuse? ?‍♂️
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Danilamak Avatar
5 weeks ago

From what I seen how arm system different behind x86
I’ll explain, for example on m1 MBA I can’t fully wipe hard drive compared to x86

How I know this? On x86 after you wipe drive you had small utility that can download from internet full recovery

On ARM you can’t wipe recovery it’s always there, and you can’t do some sort of complex format drive, for truly deleting files from drive.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
edubfromktown Avatar
5 weeks ago
No encryption here (I'm never signed into Apple when I install an update).

Carbon Copy Cloner rollback continues to be break glass way out. So far Tahoe is ok on my M1 Max Studio and M3 Pro 14" MBP.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)