MacOS 27 Golden Gate: Top New Features

One of the most interesting new features is Custom Extensions, which lets you create an extension for Safari in natural language. Lastly, the new version of Safari will work the Passwords app to automatically fix website login passwords that are deemed no longer safe to use.

The other exciting implementation of Apple Intelligence is within the Shortcuts app. The app received some artificial intelligence upgrades last year, but this new update takes things much further. You can now use natural language to design an automated shortcut, no longer requiring the manual work of connecting functions within apps together. Apple's example was that you could type, “Whenever I'm leaving work, calculate the ETA, and send it to Pedro," which would use a combination of Maps and Messages.

Other updates include using natural language when creating an event in Calendar, which will then fill in the details with contacts or locations. Image Playground also received a major update, which is now based on Google's Gemini image generation tech. It can now cook up photorealistic imagery, and looks far less limited in what it can do. Like other image generation apps, Image Playground will be subject to daily limits, but paid iCloud+ subscriptions can buy you more image generation.

Tweaks to Liquid Glass

While AI is the focus of the update, Golden Gate is also a follow-up to last year's macOS Tahoe. Liquid Glass represented a major change to the way all the user interface elements of the appear, and in macOS Golden Gate, those UI elements are being refined. Answering complaints about indecipherability and messy menus, macOS now has a refraction effect in its transparency, which more strongly obscures background content and makes the text in the foreground easier to read. This can be customized in System Settings, letting you change the transparency level using a slider.

Apple has also made some smaller refinements to the visual identity of macOS. The Tool bar now has a uniform menu, the sidebars expand to the very edge of the window and the icons within the sidebars have color once again. And perhaps my most requested feature, every window has the same corner radius to the window control buttons.

Beyond the visual elements, Apple says it's also made improvements to responsiveness, such as memory usage, CPU usage, display rendering, and app switching. One example on the Mac was that moving between Spaces was more fluid now, as is opening Mission Control.