macOS 27 Golden Gate - 50+ New Features & Changes!

Apple just released Mac OS 27 Golden Gate beta 1, and it contains more than 50 new features and changes. So, in this video, we'll be walking through the muchneeded design changes, the new Siri, and much more. Okay, so first off, you can see that we do have a new wallpaper here. This is the new Golden Gate wallpaper. So, if you go ahead and put it in dark mode, you will see how it changes. This is the dark mode version. It kind of has a purple tone to it, and when it's in light mode, it has that kind of brown and purplish gray tone to it. So, that's the new wallpaper. We don't have anything with the actual Golden Gate Bridge on it just yet. That may come in a future beta, but this is what we're working with right now. Now, the next thing you might notice pretty much right after installing this update is that there's more liquid glass and the icons down here in the dock look different. So, the icons now have more layers of liquid glass to improve detail and sharpness just overall. And if you hover over the apps, you'll notice that the little name tag now has more liquid glass as well. And you can actually make that even more extreme now for the first time in Mac OS. So take a look at the search bubble right here. This definitely has more liquid glass than what we've seen previously. Now if we go into our settings and go into the appearance section, we have a brand new liquid glass section just like we see on iOS and iPad OS. This is where we can adjust the intensity of the liquid glass. And you'll see this changing in real time, especially if you look in like the control center for example. That's what it looks like right there in the middle. If we go all the way down, you'll see, especially on the edges, how much different it looks compared to when you have it all the way up. So, you can tweak the intensity of liquid glass right here. And of course, it gives you an example as well with like the buttons that hover the kind of toolbar area, you can see, especially if you look behind search, you can see the intensity change there. So, you can now adjust that to whatever you would like. You might also notice up top we have a brand new battery icon. So, if I go ahead and unplug my MacBook, you could see the new battery icon. very similar to what we have on iOS and iPad OS as well. It just looks a little bit more opaque and just a slightly different look than what we had before. And like I just mentioned, you'll notice that the icons have more detail and sharpness, but you might also notice this just throughout Mac OS in general. And that's because Apple is now using HDR for depth and dimension in the whole Mac OS Golden Gate interface. So throughout the UI on Golden Gate, you will notice that there's a little bit more depth and dimension. It just looks better than before. But there's a lot more to the design improvements than just that. Because if you take a look at the windows, more specifically the corner radius on all of the windows, it now matches even with thirdparty applications like I have, you know, Audacity right here on Mac OS Tahoe that had a different corner radius. It was just inconsistent with the other windows. But now that's fixed here with Golden Gate. That's one of the biggest design complaints from Tahoe. It's now been resolved with Golden Gate. And you'll also notice that the radius is just smaller in general. like it's not as extreme as it was in Tahoe. Now, you'll notice also a pretty big improvement to the sidebars here. So, if you take a look at the sidebars in any application, we no longer have a floating sidebar. It was kind of like raised before. Now, the sidebar over here is edgetoedge in every application. And it's not just in applications. You'll notice this throughout Mac OS Golden Gate. So, you'll notice it even right here in Finder. You can see that it's edge to edge now. It's not doesn't have like that little white area where it looks like it's raised. And the same can be said about the toolbar. So we now have uniformed toolbars in applications. Like if you take a look at mail for example, you can see the toolbar is much more consistent. It's just it stands out more. The text headings and the groups of controls are much more legible than they were in Mac OS Tahoe. So another, you know, major design change that we have here. Not really a change, more of a fix to what Tahoe broke. Like all the big complaints about Tahoe were basically all design related. And it seems like Apple took note of that. they actually listened and they've been fixing all of those design issues. And you'll also notice that the active window is just more distinct now as well. And you can kind of see the borders better. But let's get out of all these applications because I want to show you the menu bar because we have some nice changes up here to the menu bar as well. So I'm going to go into my settings first and go into menu bar. And you'll see right here we now have a new option that says show suggestions in control gallery. So when you go into your control center and go to edit controls, you'll notice that we have these suggestions right there. Those have always been there, but now we have the option to turn that off. So if you don't like seeing suggestions in the control gallery, you can now turn those off. So now if I go over here, go to edit controls, you can see it's much cleaner. We can X out of this as well. Much cleaner and we don't have those suggestions if you're not somebody who wants suggestions. And by the way, take a look at the liquid glass in the control center. This is kind of a good example of what liquid glass looks like when it's all the way down to the left. Like if we go over to our appearance here, you can see it's all the way to the left. That's a good example of what it could look like compared to like in the middle where it looks kind of like this. But if we go back to menu bar, there's also a really nice new feature here in Mac OS Golden Gate. So if we go ahead and put in quite a few of these up here, you'll notice up in the top we now have these two arrows and that's because we can now hide icons. So if you go ahead and click on that, you can see it will start adding different icons over here. Like the more you add to the menu bar, the more it's going to kind of go across even over the notch right there. And you can see that now if you want to hide those icons only keep it limited to these over here, you can press on these two arrows and that will hide them. You'll also have the Ethernet status in your menu bar. So if you are connected via Ethernet, it will show up right here in the menu bar if you go underneath of the Wi-Fi section. Now let's head into our Finder, something you're going to use on a daily basis. So in Finder, we have a few changes. So first off, you'll notice once again that we no longer have that floating sidebar. Looks much more clean now than it did on Tahoe. And also we now have these blue glyph icons to the left right here whereas before it was all black. But a new feature we have here in Finder is that we can now have suggested file name. So you can see this is a laptop right here but the file name is just file example webp whatever. So if we go ahead and click to try to rename that. If you wait a second you can see that we will now have a suggested file name. So if we go ahead and click on that it will automatically rename that for us. Now there is a setting for that. If you go into your Finder settings, you'll see right down here at the bottom, we have suggest file names. And it says suggested names when renaming, saving, and editing files are based on file content and the names of other files in the folder. So, it did say it will suggest something when I save it, but I'm not really seeing that. So, I just saved it, and it didn't really give me a suggestion for that. But, let's go ahead to here where it is downloaded. It just says best thumbnail. We go ahead and click right there to go and rename it. It will take a second. You can see it suggests soccer players and soccer match. So, if I do that, there we go. Boom. It's done. There's also a new animation when you click on search in Finder. So, it's a little bit more animated than it was before. And if we go up here to the menu bar and go to view under Finder, you'll notice that the glyph icons have been removed for everything underneath of this right here where you view. So, there used to be glyph icons on some of these, but they have now been removed. And if you go into customize toolbar right here, the iCloud glyph icon has been changed from Mac OS Tahoe. Now, let's talk about something else you're going to use on a daily basis, and that is the spotlight search. Except in Mac OS Golden Gate, it's not called the Spotlight search anymore. So, if you press command space, this is the search or ask page. And this is different now because Spotlight and Siri have merged into one. So, of course, if you wanted to open up an application, like if I wanted to open up Audacity, for example, it would, you know, pull that up. But this is also a place where you can ask questions and it will automatically route that to Siri. So if I say is the best audio and you'll see it says ask Siri to the right of that and if I press on return it's going to use Siri which is the new Siri AI and it's going to give me much better results. Not only that but also it will have just like we see on iOS it's going to have personal context on screen awareness inapp actions and it's going to be able to have more broadw world knowledge. So it will give you better answers across the board. So I can even say something like what version do I have installed? So it wasn't able to go in and find the version number. That was pretty specific, but it did say the version is on my screen when I pulled it up right here and it was able to read that it's version 3.77 and it said that is the latest stable release and so on. Now, like I said, it also has personal contact. So, if I say something like, "Have I mentioned Audacity to anybody before?" It's going to search through my mail, my messages, everything to see if I've mentioned it before. So, you can see I did mention it in a text message back in 2024. I discussed using it for noise reduction, compression, and limiting alongside iZotope RX. And I can expand on that as well by saying what did he ask for me to say that? And it's going to go back and read that old conversation. I don't even remember this conversation. It's going to search for the person I was having that conversation with. And it's going to pull up the context of that full conversation. As you can see, there we go. It gives me really great detail about what was actually happening in that conversation. And if I click on these arrows in the upper right hand corner, that will open up the standalone Siri application. So yes, we now have a Siri application just like we have on iOS and iPad OS. So, if we go ahead right here, we're going to do new conversation. And this is the standalone Siri conversation where it's pretty much like a chat GBT where you can have a back and forth conversation. You can go revisit old conversations and so on. So, you can click on the plus right here to attach a photo or a file as well. You have a voice mode built in now, which is pretty neat. If you go up here, you can change this view from a grid view to a list view. You can search previous conversations or within that own conversation, the conversation you have right there. And also, if we go into Siri and then we go into the settings for it. So, if we go into our settings right here and we scroll down, you can see that inside of the app section, we have the option to keep conversations limited to just 30 days, 1 year, or forever. You can also change what the application opens to, whether that's a new conversation or just your previous conversation that you had. And if you rightclick on something, you can also pin that conversation. So, if you wanted to always show up up top, you can do that. You can rename and open a new window. And something else that's cool about the Siri AI on here is that you could actually use visual intelligence as well. So if I were to go to this image right here and go to ask Siri, I could say find this. So I can do that and it's going to pull up that image, you know, that I rightclicked on. It's going to find that shirt for me online. And take a look at that. It says that's the Lululemon Evolution Polo with a zip collar. It was able to point out, you know, which one it was. And I can go ahead and click right here and it will take me to that shirt. So let's see if it's correct. So it's going to go right here. And does that look correct? Actually, I don't know if that's correct. It's this it's the right uh website. It's the right, you know, line, Lululemon, but I don't think that's the exact one. So, you can see it's not going to be perfect. I'm going to keep that in there just so you guys can see. It's not going to be perfect, but at least you can use that. Okay, so we'll try for something like these pink pants right here, saying I want to buy these pants. So, let's see if it pulls off the right ones this time. So, these are the licensed to train midrise lightweight joggers. Okay, so it got these ones right. So, it did get that one right. And it also has the correct color as well. So sometimes you may see it might mess up and give you a very similar product but not the exact one. This time though it did get it right. So that's pretty cool. And of course you can expand this as well and go into the standalone Siri application. And let me show you something else cool that Siri can do. So I can say remind me to buy this next Friday at 4 p.m. and also add a note to the notes app with a link to purchase. So since we do have in-app actions as well, it will be able to do this and go into those applications and perform those actions for me. And it's going to ask if I want to confirm this Friday or next Friday. Okay. So, I'm just going to do okay. And it's going to ask me if I want to create that note with a link to purchase. I'll go to continue. And there we go. It says I've set a reminder for next Friday to buy the pants. I also created a note with the purchase link for you. So, let's go into our notes and see if it actually did. And would you look at that? There we go. It did automatically create that along with a link to purchase. So, Siri is finally actually smart here with iOS 27, Mac OS 27, and all the other 27 updates. Now, let's go into the apps right here. So, if you go to your applications, of course, we can get back to the search or ask right there. I just like tapping on the apps right here. There's also a minor change in this area. So the icon to the right is a little bit larger now. So it is a more compact window than what we had before, but you can see like Lightroom for example, it's more of a high quality icon and it's also a little bit larger. And also the three dots right here no longer have an outline. In Tahoe, these had an outline around the three dots. And you'll also notice throughout Mac OS Golden Gate that you have more relevant spotlight search suggestions. So the suggestions down here will be more accurate. And I've also noticed that the top hits are just more reliable and more accurate and actually showing what I'm looking for a lot more than what I saw on Tahoe. Apple also says we're going to have faster shortcuts and actions indexing in Spotlight. So you should see those index faster. Now let's head into Safari because we do also have some changes in Safari in Mac OS Golden Gate. So first off, you will notice that we have more liquid glass throughout just like we said earlier. So especially in the address bar, you will notice a more liquid glassy effect. But there's also something else you'll see here, and that is if you swipe up, you can now refresh the page by swiping up, just like we've been able to do on iOS and iPad OS. Now, in Safari, and also in some other applications as well, you could simply swipe up and it will refresh the page, which is really nice. It actually saves you some time from having to press command R or going up here and pressing it in the address bar. You can just do it with a simple one swipe gesture. And if you take a look underneath of the address bar, you might notice something different here as well. We have this little Apple product section. And that's because now with Mac OS Golden Gates, we can now have automatically organized tabs. So you can see right here it says Safari can automatically create topics and organize related tabs as you browse. If I click on automatically organize, it will do that and it will organize everything into its own section like you see here for Apple products. If you click on that, it will kind of expand that view. You click again and it will go back into that more compact view. And if you hover over it, that's where it will show you everything that's in there. You could also right click on that and say move to tab groups. If you wanted to move that to a tab group, you can do that. And you could also, you know, give feedback on it. And if you go up to your Safari right here and go into settings, this is where you can go to the tab section. And you can see that we have this brand new option here that says organize tabs. And you can do it by recommended topics. So this is going to manually group related topics into topics that Safari recommends. So you could have that or you could do automatically where it says Safari automatically detects related tabs and groups them into topics. Or you could just never organize your tabs. We could have it just back to the old school way. And since this is the first beta, it may not organize them perfectly right now, but as the betas go on, this will get better. Now, if we click on these three dots right here, we have two new features. So, the first one is describe extension. So, this is something we've seen on iOS and iPad OS 27 as well, but me personally, I use extensions in Safari a lot more on my Mac. So, I found this to be more useful on Mac OS, which is why I'm going to spend a little bit of time here. So you can see that this allows you to create and kind of vibe code an extension for your Safari browser. Now this is very limited. You cannot really do too much with this. You can't really pull in from outside resources like I tried to build something like with uh you know Amazon seeing if a price was cheaper last week. You can't do something like that. This is going to be much more simplistic than that. But it is pretty cool. You can also see some examples right here. So you can have things like close duplicate tabs pointing to the same URL when I click the extension. Just different things like that for productivity. You can kind of copy these and put those in there if you want that. You can do things like style web pages like fun '9s websites with bold colors and type. So, it's really just a lot of visual things. And one of the examples I used before that's actually useful is show me the fonts used. So, I can say things like show fonts used on a website and it will create that for me. It will also show other extensions that may exist out there that do that same thing. But if not, you can go to create and it will start creating that extension. You can see the little progress bar right there. And there we go. It was created. I could tap on try. And now it's going to show me the fonts that were used on this site. So we'll go ahead to save. We'll go right here. So I guess it says 2 A's right here. So if I click on that, it will show fonts used. And there we go. It shows me all the fonts used on this website. Let's see if we can get more specific going into a page like this. Let's see if it's different. We'll click on that. And yes, it will show the updated fonts used. So the UI here looks much better on Mac OS than it did on iPad OS and iOS, which I did the same kind of, you know, extension. It looks better here on Mac OS. And by the way, these do live in the typical Safari extensions page. If you go to the extensions tab in your Safari settings, you will see, you know, your custom created one right here along with the other, you know, installed extensions that you already had previously. You could also edit it from here as well. So, if you want to describe a change and, you know, edit the permissions, you could also do that from the settings. Now, here's something else cool you could do in Safari. So, if you go back to the address bar and click on these lines right here, you will see that we have a new option called notify me. And what this does is it lets you know when a website updates the content that you're interested in. So, let's say for example, you know, uh the most common one for this is like, oh, if something's out of stock, you can have it remind you when something comes back in stock if they don't have a typical like email signup. That's a great way to do that. But these days, most websites have an email signup. So, you could do something also like, you know, when a score changes or when a score becomes final, something like that. Or something I really could do that's going to help me in my business is on the Apple Newsroom site, I can go here and say, "Notify me and say when there's a new post." And then it says check daily at 3:07 p.m. But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do check daily and we're going to do at like 9:00 a.m. Okay. So, we're going to do 9:00 a.m. And we're going to go ahead and tap on done. And now it's going to notify me with a system setting right here or a system notification rather when this site updates with a new post. And it's going to check automatically in the background every day at 9:00 a.m. Just make sure you go up here to this little bubble and go to allow. That way you allow notifications from this. And it says notify me when there's a new post. Next check is tomorrow at 9:00 am. And once again, you could also edit this just like the extensions if you go to edit right here. And that will allow you to change it. And you can also change the frequency as well. Apple also says that Safari now has smoother scrolling than Tahoe and also enhanced power efficiency. So in theory, you should drain less battery while using Safari. And you might notice that scrolling is just a tad bit smoother. There's also some changes to iPhone mirroring. So this is not working properly in the very first beta, but you could also resize applications. And this is said to be a hint at the upcoming iPhone Fold. Also, with iPhone mirroring, there's now support for DRM video. So, if you watch like Netflix or Apple TV or Hulu on a mirrored iPhone, it will now play the video and the audio. Sometimes before it would just be a black screen since it was protected with DRM. If you're somebody with a high-end display, like a 5K display, you now have Mac mirroring support. So, you can now mirror your Mac to a display up to 5K resolution. Also, there's more high resolution and high refresh rate display modes for external displays. There's also now smoother animations in both mission control and spaces. In the photos application, if we go to edit right here, and then we go over to tools, you'll see that we have the cleanup, extend, and reframe features, which we saw in iOS and iPad OS 27. So, cleanup is now generative. So, you're able to generate, you know, parts of images. Extend allows you to extend the image. And of course, refframe is my personal favorite. This one's really cool because it allows you to change the composition of a photo. It's pretty trippy actually. So, you can watch my iOS 27 video. I went a lot more in detail with these features on there, which is probably going to be the main place you actually use these features. But, I will just show you this one very briefly just to show you how it works on the Mac. So, we're just going to drag and change the perspective of this image right here. So, we're going to make it like higher up and also like over here a little bit. So, we'll go ahead and you can see you actually have these numbers right here, which you don't see this on iOS and iPad OS. So, it's pretty cool. You can actually change it from these sliders. So if you want to go more vertical, if you want to straighten it, zoom, you have all these different sliders you could do right here as well, which is pretty neat. So if we go ahead and do refframe, it's going to reframe the image. And now it's probably going to look a good bit different than it did before. And keep in mind, this feature does utilize the private cloud compute. So it will reach out to the cloud servers for this as well. So it might take a little bit longer than something you do on device. And there we go. That is what the refframed version looks like. So that was the original. That is the refframed version. So pretty crazy. I mean, to an untrained eye, it doesn't really look like AI was used anywhere. So, pretty wild stuff. Pretty cool feature. Now, if we head into the shortcuts application, you'll notice a change right away here as well. And just like we see on iOS and iPad OS, we now have the ability to create a shortcut using natural language. So, we can just describe the shortcut we want to use and it will create it for us without having to go in and, you know, do it all manually like this. So, if you go in here, you have your actions, your scripting, all of this. It was super advanced. Basically, any regular user would have to watch a tutorial to know how to use it. So, it's much better now because you could just simply describe what you want to be made and after you make it, you could describe a change you want to be made with it. So, I'll just say something like create a GIF out of a video. So, let's see if it can create that for me. Okay, so there we go. It says, "This shortcut will select a video from photos, convert the video to a GIF, preview the generated GIF." So, let's go ahead and run that and see what it does. So, it looks like it prompts me to choose a video I want the GIF to be made out of. So, I'm just going to do this little 11second video right here. Let's see if it works. You can see it running up here in this live activity up top and it made it full screen, but you can see it's making a GIF out of the entire video. Okay, so you can see it's making a GIF out of the entire video. So if I want to describe a change, let's just say I want to choose only a section of the video. So let's see if it understands what I'm trying to say by saying I don't want to use the full video, just part of it. And there we go. It actually did fix it. So it says select a video, trim the video to your desired section, convert it to a GIF, and then preview the GIF. So that's pretty cool. And of course, if you do want to continue to change that, you could just go in here to edit actions, and you will be able to see everything it used, all the actions it used, and you can do it the old school way, where you can go back to here and keep describing the changes that you want to make. The weather app has a nice redesign here in Mac OS Golden Gate, just like we see on iOS and iPad OS 27. So, we now have highlights up here at the very top that gives you a highlight for the day, kind of like a just a general forecast of what you can expect throughout the day. And if you scroll down, you will see we have some other things right here. So, if we go to the conditions, you can tap this. You can click on the little rain for precipitation, and it shows this whole new UI here. So, it shows where you're at in the day versus, you know, when it's going to rain on all these different days. You can see the little uh percentages right there along with the amount of rain expected. You can go to the wind right here, and you can see this new UI as well. So, this new kind of graph right here that shows the range, and it shows when the wind is going to be highest. We have the white dot to show where we're currently at on that. So, pretty cool. This whole section is new and it's much better I think than it was previously. The free form application has a few changes. So you can see actually when you open it up for the first time it will show you the splash screen telling you what's new. So we do have a dark mode now. You can now organize your boards into folders and invite others to collaborate. You can now draw on a Mac. You could add sketches, you know, with your uh cursor here. And you could also ask to join shared boards or folders and automate adding content using shortcuts. So, if we put our device into dark mode, let's see if it changes to dark mode because it did not before. So, as you can see, yes, it does change fully over to dark mode, which is nice. And let's try out the drawing. So, if you click right here in this big clean area, you can go to draw with pen. And this allows you to draw on the free form application. So, you can just kind of do like this. And that is something new here in Mac OS Golden Gate. So, that is new there. And we can also do drawing in notes by the way as So, if we go into our notes app, you'll notice if we go into the pen tool right here, we are able to draw now on notes on Mac OS as well. Previously, we were not able to do any type of free form drawing like this. And you get all the other typical things down here as well, like you could switch between different pens. You have all these. You have monoline, marker, pencil, all of those, watercolor, you could change the color right here. You have your shapes, you have your text, and you also have your signatures right here. So, all of those are able to be adjusted. And this is something new you can do now in notes. And again also in free form in the passwords application we can automatically fix our passwords agentically. So if you have compromised passwords or weak passwords and you go to get started right here it says automatic fix password. So it uses Apple intelligence to automatically fix weak and compromised passwords for you. And what it's going to do is go into these websites and change your password for you agentically and it's going to have access as long as you give it access to you know read your messages to get the 2FA code. So it could do all that process in the background and then it will automatically save that new password to your passwords application. If we head into the podcast application, we now have support for video podcast. So we go down here to a video podcast and we start playing that, you will see that it will show that right there. We also have captions for that. So if you go here, you could see the different chapters and you will have captions similar to what we see on iOS and iPad OS 27. And of course the sidebar here looks much better than it did previously in Tahoe as well. We do also get the other features and changes that you see on the iPhone. The image playground application has a new UI. So, this whole interface looks so much better than it did previously. And I have a photo of myself loaded up here. And I just said I want to describe and kind of make an image where I'm wearing an Apple hat and an Apple necklace. And you can also choose the style right here as well. So, if you want to choose a specific style, you can do that. You can also change the aspect ratio from square, portrait, or landscape. So, we'll go ahead and do this and see how it turns out. You can see the new little animation here as well. So, take a look at that. I am wearing an Apple hat now and I am wearing an Apple necklace. That's pretty funny. Also, if we head into our settings and go into accessibility, we do have quite a few accessibility features. These are all a lot of the same ones that you see on iOS as well. But one I wanted to point out here is if you go down to the hearing section, subtitles and captioning is now its own section. Before these were separated, now it's its own section. And if you go into here, we also have a new toggle for apply across apps. And if you turn this on, you'll be able to see subtitles and captioning in other applications, including in the photos application. You can see captions for your own selfshot videos. And then something else I wanted to point out is that with Mac OS 27, you now have faster user account creation when you have a fresh install of Mac OS on your device. You know, when you set up a username and a password for your Mac, that will now be faster to create than before, which if you've done that, you probably know that it just kind of hangs there for a while, like a good 30 seconds. So, I've done that a lot here on the channel, setting up new Macs. So, that has been improved, which is great. So, those are more than 50 new features and changes found in Mac OS 27 Golden Gate beta 1. Now, more features and changes will of course be added throughout the beta stages, and I will make a full video in September when the official version launches. This is just in beta now, so expect bugs, expect, you know, issues. That is part of the beta process. However, Apple did say that this update and all the updates across the board, the 27 updates, are going to be a lot more refined and stable than what we've seen in the past. It's been quite surprising, to be honest, to be so stable on a first beta. But keep in mind, it is a beta. Things will go wrong. So, keep that in mind. But those are the new features and changes. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know what your favorite one is down in the comments section below.