Illustrator 2026 won't open on multiple computers

I’d suspect a compatibility or permissions issue between Illustrator 30.x and Tahoe rather than a problem with your Mac hardware, especially since Illustrator 2025 continues to launch normally. There have also been recent Adobe Community reports of Error 224 specifically when launching Illustrator 2026, with licensing/activation and macOS permissions being among the suggested areas to investigate.

Before doing another reinstall, I’d try these in order:

• Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access and make sure Illustrator and Creative Cloud have the required access.
• Sign out of Creative Cloud, restart the Mac, then sign back in.
• Reset Illustrator preferences.
• Temporarily disable or update third-party extensions, especially Wacom software if you use a tablet. There have been Tahoe/Illustrator launch reports where Wacom software was involved.
• If it still fails, try launching Illustrator from a new macOS administrator account. Adobe has specifically recommended this test for Tahoe-related Illustrator launch problems.

Since the same failure is happening on two Macs, I’d also pay particular attention to anything common between them same Creative Cloud account, plugins, fonts, Wacom software, security software, or the same Illustrator build. That makes a machine-specific hardware problem much less likely.

I wouldn’t remove the working 2025 version yet; keeping it available is a sensible fallback until 2026 launches reliably.