I should have added the following: I know those properties are set because I log them in the text field's drawRect: method. Also, those properties are ignored during light/dark appearance transitions but the text field's colors change. That means that the background (and perhaps text color and other properties) are hardwired into NSTextField in Tahoe whereas before they were not. In addition, the compiler does not give deprecation warnings upon those property's use nor are they marked as deprecated in the documentation.