Apple keeps checking items off my Mac wishlist
A couple of years ago, I recalled that in the early days of Mac OS X, I built up an entire array of utilities that allowed me to use my Mac just how I wanted it. I felt utterly naked on a Mac without LaunchBar, for example. But in the intervening two decades since OS X’s early days, Apple has just kept improving the base features of macOS to the point where most of my old “must-have Mac utilities” had become ones I kept around more out of habit than necessity. And in some cases, I’ve stopped using old favorites entirely because Apple’s built-in tools did the job. That’s good, because a new Mac user shouldn’t need to install a half-dozen utilities to get about being productive.
WWDC 2025 has made me revisit this same subject, because it turns out that the two biggest limitations of default macOS productivity that I saw back then are both addressed in macOS 26:
Many apps can act as clipboard managers—I’ve been using the one in LaunchBar for years, and Pastebot is a popular favorite—and once you use a clipboard manager, it’s hard to go back to Apple’s concept, unchanged in nearly 40 years, that there’s a single clipboard and once you copy something new, the old clipboard is gone forever. I now reflexively copy multiple items in one app and then paste those items into a different app rather than doing the old back-and-forth. I rely on the clipboard history to dig out an item from half an hour ago without having to look it up again…
Another area of interest is file management and automation. I recently wrote about how Folder Actions is somehow still a thing in macOS. Think about offering users the ability to select a folder in Finder or Files and build actions that would occur when those folders changed. Folder Actions enabled some of that, and utilities like Hazel have taken it to the extreme. Sure, power users can run wild with features like this, but I think regular users might appreciate being able to say, “When a file in this folder is older than 60 days, file it away somewhere else,” or “Delete all the disk image files in my downloads folder older than 60 days.” There’s something there.
In macOS 26, there’s a built-in clipboard manager that can be accessed from the Spotlight interface, and a new set of Shortcuts triggers let you run automations when events occur on your Mac or at specific intervals.
I’m sure there are still corners of macOS that could benefit from new features from Apple—there are always new frontiers—but I’m struck by the fact that two of the most glaring areas for improvement have been directly addressed in macOS 26 Tahoe. I can’t wait to spend more time with it in beta this summer.
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