By Jason Snell

September 14, 2026 10:17 AM PT

macOS 27 Golden Gate Review: Bridging the Tahoe gap

Last year’s macOS release, macOS 26 Tahoe, was a mixed bag. While it added a bunch of solid new productivity features, it also included a half-baked visual update that muddied the entire interface. While I chose to view the glass as half full and accepted the interface imperfections, I understand that a lot of people just gave Tahoe a pass rather than inflict a visual regression on themselves.

No matter how full you think the (liquid) glass was, I have good news: macOS 27 Golden Gate is here, and it’s good. Not only has Apple addressed most of the visual problems with last year’s release, but if you skipped Tahoe, you’re also going to be dazzled by Tahoe features like Apple’s first native clipboard history, Shortcuts automation and AI access, and an improved Spotlight.

For everyone who spent a year grinding in Tahoe, Golden Gate doesn’t just improve the look of the entire system, but offers a host of other improvements. This is an update nobody will have to apologize for liking.

Design takes a step forward

The fact that there are more design changes in macOS than any of Apple’s other 27 updates speaks volumes about how broken many of the Tahoe design decisions were. Apple describes the design as “even more refined,” because in Apple marketing-speak, broken features are never remedied or fixed—past features are just improved. The truth is, Apple has rolled back numerous missteps and made changes to others to mitigate the issues they caused.

Floating glass sidebars inset from window edges—a choice that made sense metaphorically, but looked awful—are gone, essentially reverted to their previous design, sitting at the left edge of windows, with a darker background for contrast and colored icons to boot.

Toolbars, one of the most important interface conventions of macOS, were flattened and ghostly in Tahoe. In Golden Gate, they pick up better shading and are more legible, though (strangely) the toolbar in inactive windows offers more contrast and legibility than in active ones! In Photos, toolbars are actual bars, not horizontal areas of floating glassy buttons—which means the system no longer has to attempt to add shading behind those areas in order to improve legibility. They’re just legible.

In Golden Gate, windows generally just feel… a bit more square. Apple has made window corners more consistent, and not having the curved corners of the sidebar right inside the curved corners of the window edge also helps make it feel a little less like you’re under the tyrannical rule of the Circle King.

Icons look better across the board in Golden Gate, probably because of a new layered icon compositing approach Apple is taking across its platforms. Unfortunately, apps that dare stick any of their extremities out of the mandated squircle shape are still put in a featureless gray box of shame, which makes it harder to identify icons, especially in appearance modes like Clear and Tinted that remove color as an identifier.

The iconic macOS “stoplight” window controls have even gotten a bit of a glow-up, with some Liquid Glass shading added to the three circles in the top left of windows. I think they’re cute. Not only are they more harmonious with the other Liquid Glass design elements in macOS (and all of Apple’s current operating systems), but they also hearken back to the classic Aqua design language that was introduced along with Mac OS X back in the day. I don’t know if I want to lick these stoplight icons, but they do look a little candy-like, and I’m here for it.

To hear Apple tell it, users are split on the transparency effect of Liquid Glass: some people despise it, and some people can’t get enough of it. As a result, all of Apple’s OS 27 updates introduce a slider—it’s in the Appearances pane of Settings on macOS—that lets you customize the transparency from sort-of-mostly-transparent to sort-of-mostly-opaque. Given that this update rolls back a lot of Apple’s decisions from a year ago, I’m inclined to believe that there really are two camps when it comes to Liquid Glass. Giving users an option to adjust the setting is fine—I think in the end I will adjust it just to the opaque side of center.

Siri AI takes the Spotlight

Siri has been a part of the Mac experience for a decade now, arriving on the platform five years after it debuted on the iPhone. While I’m sure that many Mac users have embraced it over the years, it has always been an afterthought at best for me. When I’m sitting at my Mac, I’ve got a keyboard and trackpad to get my job done, so I don’t generally feel the need to talk to my computer. And while you’ve been able to type to Siri for a while now… well, the other problem with Siri has always been that Siri’s results are rarely as useful as the results of typing those words into a search engine or some other tool.

In macOS Golden Gate, as with all the other OS 27-era releases, Apple has upgraded Siri to become Siri AI, with LLM-derived features that promise much better results. On top of that, Apple has finally done what it should have done long ago and merged Siri and Spotlight, so there are no longer two separate “type to find things” interfaces on the platform.

Apple is labeling this feature as a beta within macOS 27.0, though I’m of the opinion that if you ship a feature in your “final” OS version, it’s fair to judge it. Fortunately for Apple, Siri AI actually works quite well. In terms of general-knowledge queries, it’s very good—good enough that if you previously relied on Google Gemini or ChatGPT for basic questions, you probably can just use Siri and be happy.

But part of the appeal of Siri AI is its integration with your personal on-device data. And here, the results are encouraging—but a bit of a work in progress. Siri AI takes advantage of an updated Spotlight index to search files on your Mac, including data in apps such as Mail and Calendar. I found that asking targeted questions can generate good responses, but you need to be aware of the system’s limitations. Some third-party apps aren’t tied into the Spotlight index, and if there isn’t local searchable data (for example, if you use Gmail and aren’t using Apple Mail) you just can’t search that data at all. I ended up setting up Apple’s Calendar and Mail apps on my Mac, even though I use Fantastical and Mimestream for those purposes, just so I could be sure Spotlight and Siri could search through my calendar items and mail.

Still, there are some magic moments to be had. I asked Siri what episodes I should be watching next for the “Magnum, p.i.” podcast I do with friends—yes, I have my finger on the pulse of today’s culture—and it managed to make an intelligent search of my Messages archive and pull out the relevant message that I sent to the group listing what our next episodes were. That felt like magic. It doesn’t happen like that every time—there’s a lot of “here are a bunch of PDFs that might work, good luck”—but it’s all quite promising.

There’s a new Ask Siri entry that’s been added to the top of every contextual menu, and while I don’t mind the idea that Siri can act on just about any context you can think of on the Mac, I don’t love how it’s implemented. It’s at the top of every single context menu (regardless of applicability) and darker than the rest of the menu. If you click on it, it floats forward, the rest of the menu disappears, and you can type in the resulting box. I don’t mind the impulse, but it feels like Apple is trying too hard to push Ask Siri into places it doesn’t belong.

And I don’t want to soft-pedal the Spotlight improvements, even though they were obviously made to benefit Siri AI. Spotlight is also better in Golden Gate, all around. Suggestions are better, and if you use Apple Mail you will find the search function there much improved. Sometimes upgrades made to benefit AI can benefit regular humans, too!

Touchscreen Macs, at last?

One of the most remarkable features of macOS Golden Gate does not really make sense if you take it at face value: Apple has given a major upgrade to Sidecar, the feature introduced in 2019 that allows Macs to use iPads as external Mac displays. As someone who always travels with a 13-inch iPad Pro, that’s a nice feature, though since the 2022 introduction of Universal Control, which lets me use my Mac’s keyboard and mouse on an iPad still running iPadOS, I’ve found very little use for Sidecar.

The big update is that Sidecar, which previously only supported the Apple Pencil, now works with the iPad’s touchscreen. Apple has updated its own apps and supplied third-party apps with the appropriate tools to support full touchscreen support. You can now scroll Mac browser windows with a finger and drag windows around on screen… but only on that iPad you’re using as an extra display.

It’s not hard to read between the lines: As numerous reports have suggested, Apple is planning on releasing its first touch-enabled MacBooks late this year or early next year. Using Sidecar as a way to demo the technology and allow developers to test their apps in advance is really clever.

Beyond that, this feature is delightfully boring. It just does more or less what you’d expect. Adding touch to macOS isn’t going to be revolutionary—it’s been on Windows for ages, and iPads have had optional trackpads and keyboards for six years now. But it’ll be a nice incremental benefit. I still use touch gestures when I’m working on an iPad in laptop configuration, because sometimes it just makes ergonomic sense. If my hands aren’t on the keyboard and I need to scroll something or tap something, a quick poke with my finger does the job. It feels natural—and once you’ve spent some time with that configuration, it’s jarring to use a Mac laptop and realize that you’re poking the screen to no effect.

After a moment’s glee in being able to scroll a Finder window with my finger, using Sidecar with touch to drive the Mac interface just became… normal. Apple has done a good job implementing the feature. Menus drop down reliably. Buttons are tappable. Scrolling works. There’s just not a lot to report, and that’s just fine. It works.

Shortcuts, reduced and enhanced

The Shortcuts app, the cornerstone of Apple’s cross-platform automation technologies, gets a notable upgrade during this cycle. Most of it is probably due to the needs of Describe a Shortcut, a remarkable new feature that lets you input some text and then watch as your device converts it into a Shortcut.

It is, in some ways, a longstanding dream of the computer industry finally realized. You can literally describe what you want your device to do—”every morning show me my to-dos and calendar events for the day”—and it will generate a program to do it and a schedule to run it.

Describe a Shortcut is limited—Shortcuts of great complexity are beyond its ken, as are ones that use actions from third-party apps—but when it works, it’s magical.

Perhaps its best feature is that you can iterate on your Shortcuts. If there’s something it doesn’t do quite right the first time, you can specify changes you’d like to see—”only show me items from my Personal calendar”—and it’ll rewrite the Shortcut to take those changes into account. In that way, it’s emulating the back-and-forth conversations that can make vibe coding so remarkable.

For those of us still building Shortcuts with our own fingers like animals, some of the other improvements will help that work get done. There’s a new Otherwise If statement that can be added to If-Else blocks (you get to it by control-clicking on the Else block and then choosing Add “Otherwise If”), making the structuring of branching shortcuts logic much, much simpler.

There’s also support for persistent data storage, which is kind of huge. You can save data, which syncs via iCloud and is accessible across your devices, and Shortcuts can both access it and update it! That will make Shortcuts capable of behaving more like other apps, all without having to rig up other ways of storing data in iCloud Drive or elsewhere. (Yes, this canonizes Simon Støvring’s Data Jar in Apple’s OS, and that’s a good thing.)

The arrival of Describe a Shortcut has changed the Shortcuts interface a bit. On the Mac, there’s a new three-paned interface, where the third pane is a giant preview of a shortcut’s color, icon, and (this is fun) an AI-generated summary of what the shortcut does. The pane exists because of the text box at the bottom, which lets you type input to Describe a Shortcut to make changes to whatever shortcut you’ve got selected. Fortunately, it’s easy to resize or hide that pane and go back to the more standard Shortcuts look.

New horizons for Photos

There are a bunch of big changes in Photos this year, but the three biggest ones are driven by AI. And they’re a bit of a mixed bag.

Clean Up, which removes unwanted items from the background of photos, has been improved a lot. The new version is much more adept at artfully clipping unwanted items out of an image and filling those areas with in-context backgrounds.

The other two features, Extend and Spatial Reframe, require the use of an advanced diffusion model that’s only available via Private Cloud Compute, and as a result, they take time to execute, since Photos will need to upload your photo, wait for a result, and then download the result.

Extend feels like a good feature, since there are plenty of scenarios where your image needs just a little more headroom or width. However, every pixel you expand the selection increases the jeopardy that what’s going to be generated is weird or fake. Everyone’s mileage may vary, but I found that I was much more comfortable expanding a photo a little bit to gain some headroom than doing it a lot, forcing the AI system to invent more objects or scenes. I was occasionally frustrated that I couldn’t slightly extend the bottom of some images, where subjects’ legs or feet were cut off. Also, you have to be aware of incredible fabrications—extending a graduation photo added a gigantic floating tassel and an invented piece of furniture, and extending a stadium shot added a roof where there isn’t one. Judicious use, carefully analyzed, is my advice.

Then there’s Spatial Reframe, which brings together a load of existing Apple technologies, including the spatial scanning algorithm it used to create spatial photos on Vision Pro. This feature works by scanning your photo locally using that algorithm, inferring a depth map that is then used to build a 3-D version of the image that you can pivot a bit, up and down, and left and right. This is the effect that allows you, on the Vision Pro, to feel like you can move your head and see parallaxes shifting, even though, if you look closely, the exposed content behind a subject is just a simple generative fill. It all happens so quickly, and in service of a live 3-D effect, that it’s often not noticeable, and even when it is, it’s not that big a deal.

The bar is a lot higher for a fixed, 2-D photo at full resolution. So after you use Spatial Reframe to slightly move the perspective of a shot, all the data is sent up to Private Cloud Compute, where a new version of your shot is rendered—including much more advanced generation of all of those pixels that are revealed by parallax or at the edges of the frame.

Some results are more synthetic than others. Unlike Extend, Spatial Reframe changes the entire perspective of the picture, which requires everything visible to be re-rendered at full quality. The result sometimes feels artificial. Again, my first impression is for people to use this feature with care and caution.

Apple has finally updated its Shared Albums feature, which had been compromised since it launched because it didn’t offer the ability to share full-resolution images. Over the years, Apple added other methods of sharing groups of photos via iCloud, and those could include full-resolution images, but this one prominent feature felt stuck in the past.

Now it’s getting a proper upgrade, with support for full-resolution images and allowing for full collaboration with people on other platforms so that everyone can contribute to a shared photo album. I’m relieved that I will soon have to stop explaining the differences among the various ways to share items in Photos and warning people away from Shared Albums.

There are a handful of other nice, new Photos features, including new Captured By Me and Identity Documents sections (quick, find that photo of my passport!), and a triumphant return of star ratings for individual photos if you are the sort of person who wants to assign star ratings to things.

Safari gets organized

Across the 27 OS releases, Safari now sports an AI-driven tab organizer, so if you’re someone who keeps a zillion tabs open, you can have Safari group them into smaller, more navigable clusters. I’m not a zillion-tabs person, so I basically haven’t used this feature. I’m glad it’s there for those who are desperately in need of an injection of tab organization, though.

There’s also a new Notify Me feature that will send you a message if a webpage you’re watching changes. You can specify what kinds of changes you’re looking for using natural language, and it’ll check every hour, day, week, or month. Personally I don’t think I would ever use this feature for anything—nothing has occurred to me in the months I’ve been using the Golden Gate betas!—but if you’re someone who has a seldom-updated site you’re monitoring, maybe something involving a local government or school, I could see it being useful.

What I have found useful, however, is use Safari’s exciting new Describe Extension feature. This is essentially “vibe coding” of Safari extensions. The process is fairly simple, kicked off by clicking on the utility icon to the far right of the URL bar and choosing Describe Extension. It works exactly that way: You type out what you want the extension to do, and it’ll build it for you—but first, it’ll also search the App Store to see if there are available Safari extensions that already solve the problem.

If you’re thinking that you don’t know what you’d use this feature for, I get it. But over the summer, I ran into two instances where I was frustrated by what a website was doing, and ended up using Describe Extension to solve my problem. It was extremely satisfying.

I use StrawPoll.com to schedule podcast recording, but the site has two separate scheduling features: Create Poll and Schedule Meeting. Both of them are, of course, tools to create a poll that schedules a meeting. I never remember which one to click on. So I had Safari build me an extension for that website that hides Create Poll from the site’s navigation bar, and redirects all attempts to load the Create Poll page to the Schedule Meeting page instead. It works!

There’s also the Relay podcast networks title-voting page, which offers an archive so I can look back on title suggestions for other shows—but that link appears nowhere in the site’s interface, so I’m always trying to look it up or guess what it is. I had Safari add a link to the page’s nav bar so I never need to look it up again.

When you update to Golden Gate, keep an eye out. There are lots of opportunities for simple customizations to websites you use, once you realize you have the power to describe an extension.

This section is running in the background

In Golden Gate, the Dock now continues to display apps that haven’t quite quit, but are continuing to run in the background, with a note attached to their contextual menu that they are “running in the background” and an option to stop that background processing.

I understand why this might be useful in some circumstances. You might want to know that the app you “quit” is still hanging around. In practice, though, this is entirely contrary to how the Dock is supposed to operate.

The Dock is not a notification board for Apple’s privacy and security systems to warn us about apps doing weird things. It’s a launcher and monitor of apps that are providing a user interface. It’s never been a place to display background apps, and it shouldn’t start being one now.

On top of that, I just can’t figure out why some apps appear in the Dock in this state and some don’t. I understand an app like Photoshop, that sometimes keeps running for a little while after you quit it, being flagged in the Dock until it’s properly quit. (Which it already did, for the record.) I don’t understand fully quitting an app like Shortcuts and having it just sit in the Dock as if it were still running. Is the app misbehaving? Is this a bug? I’m baffled about this choice all the way around.

Wait, there’s more…

There are so many small enhancements in Golden Gate that it’s hard to mention them all, and every time I turn around, I keep bumping into more of them.

• Apple has added some light menu-bar management, specifically to deal with items that overflow the notch on some MacBook models. I’m glad that it’s taken this tentative step, though I wish it were more—it’s okay, Apple, you can sherlock all those menu-bar-management utilities out there—and of course, it should’ve happened back when the notch first appeared (checks notes) three years ago. Better late than never, I guess.

• Both Finder and the document save option in the menu bar will scan the contents of a file and offer up naming suggestions. I didn’t love the suggestions it offered, but your mileage may vary. I’d like to see this feature applied to auto-generated filenames like screenshots, though!

• In June, Apple introduced a feature that injected some agentic AI into the Passwords app, so that the app could automatically change your compromised or easy-to-guess passwords for you. When I tried it, it had about a 8% success rate—not great! Apple has pulled this feature from the first version of Golden Gate, hopefully to make it much better, and will re-introduce it later this year.

• Notes has gotten way more Markdown savvy. You could already import Markdown text format into Notes, but now you can go the other way, copying or pasting the contents of styled notes text as Markdown. As someone who writes everywhere in Markdown, this is a great feature.

Sail through the Golden Gate

The Golden Gate is one of California’s crown jewels, where San Francisco and Marin stand apart and allow the Pacific Ocean to mingle with the San Francisco Bay and the vast river deltas of the Central Valley. And for 89 years it’s been spanned by one of the most recognizable structures in the world.

It’s a lot to live up to. And while macOS 27 can’t possibly do that, it does manage to be a very good update that rectifies macOS 26 Tahoe’s greatest sins, unifies a more useful Siri with Spotlight, and hints at some subtle ways Apple can use on-device models to make using your computer more productive.

Tahoe users will find the entire Mac experience more attractive and cohesive. Those who stuck with macOS 15 Sequoia¹ will pick up those improvements as well as Tahoe’s raft of productivity boosts.

I live about six miles north of the Golden Gate. It’s nice here. And for the next year, It’ll be nice to have the company of a macOS version. Fortunately, it’s shaping up to be a good neighbor that’s focused on beautifying the neighborhood.

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