macOS Golden Gate is here and Siri AI is its remarkable best

After months of beta testing, Apple has released macOS Golden Gate. As always, it's a mix, but there are great improvements and Siri AI is mostly fantastic.

Fantastic is a strong word but apart from a few aspects that are still startlingly poor in it, Siri AI deserves the description. Up to now, Siri has really been an iPhone tool as it was cumbersome and slow on the Mac, and simply not as useful there.

Going straight into Siri AI

Now, incorporated into Spotlight so that it is always a keystroke within reach, Siri AI transforms the macOS Siri experience entirely. Gone is the tiny popup in a corner, and what's most welcome is that the need to stop typing and wait for Siri's response is gone too.

With macOS Golden Gate, you can call up Spotlight, ask Siri AI to find that email where you told that charity some dimensions for an advert some time, and carry on working. Faster than you could ever find that three-year-old email, Siri AI is back with exactly the answer.

But truly, the fact that you can carry on working while it looks is as transformative as what it is now capable of doing. The Spotlight/Siri AI black dialog box does pop up in the middle of your screen, but you can drag it out of the way and carry on typing in your document.

I now use Siri AI whenever I want something that I know is on my Mac somewhere, whether that's a document or an email. That charity advert email was urgent but the request came when I was deep in the AppleInsider podcast, so having it just be found for me so quickly was such a boon.

Similarly, there's a concert I was due to see last year but it was cancelled, then rescheduled, and when I suddenly worried that I'd missed the new date, it was Siri AI that said no, you're fine. You're seeing Dar Williams at this date and at this location, it told me, plus here's the email with the tickets.

On and on it goes, I'm practically at the stage of calling up Siri AI before I've finished thinking what I want. If I sound like an evangelist, it's because I now am and specifically so because macOS Golden Gate has made Siri AI so readily prominent and useful.

I would say that I no longer Google anything, I just ask Siri AI, but that's not entirely true. Siri AI doesn't always find what other AI services do, so I still keep Claude around.

Although while there presumably can't have been much work done by Apple on what it calls Siri's World Knowledge, I'm now only rarely finding Siri AI's answers to be wrong. For some reason that was different at the start of the beta test.

However, for some unfathomable reason, Siri AI responses are still intentionally limited to how much you could say in a single breath. I'm sorry, but I have no particular concern over whether Siri runs out of breath or not.

So if I'm searching for something that I know will need more detail, then I will again turn to Claude.

Plus, let this be a public service announcement: Siri AI finally works with Apple Music. But only on the Mac.

Until the last moments of the macOS Golden Gate beta test, and still in the final iOS 27 beta, Siri AI would claim to be able to add Apple Music tracks to playlists. But it would then work only just often enough that you would keep trying.

Most of the time, the gigantic majority of the time, Siri AI would say it couldn't find the playlist you said. Even if just before, you had asked it to play that playlist and it had done so without complaint.

Apple Music and Siri AI integration was, and still is on iOS, enraging, partly because of how patronizing it could be. If you keep asking, Siri AI will eventually apologize for your confusion, as if it's you who is getting this wrong.

It was not chance that means Siri AI has been coded to say "I won't respond to that" when you tell it just precisely what you think of it.

I should be ecstatic that it's now working on the Mac, but on the one hand, I almost always use that particular feature on the iPhone while driving. And on the other, there was a whole twenty minutes during one beta release where it worked on the iPhone too.

There weren't that many people using the beta, compared to how many will now have it. But Apple has the problem of convincing those beta users to try this feature again.

Which feels like an own goal because Apple already had the much greater issue of getting anyone to try Siri at all. Apple broke Siri two years ago and then left it like that.

Deep breath.

Nonetheless, you must try Siri AI on macOS Golden Gate and by itself, it is the reason to upgrade. You have to get on a waitlist, though.

What else macOS Golden Gate brings

Saying that Siri AI is the reason to upgrade is of course a way of stressing just how good it is, when it's good. But this is also close to strictly accurate as the only major update to macOS this time is Siri AI.

So there are refinements to Liquid Glass, for instance, but they're really just a sop to the vocal minority who don't like that redesign. Apple can tell you that there are now controls for adjusting just how liquid its Liquid Glass features are, for instance, and it's not lying.

But you have to whack the slider fully to one way or the other to really distinguish any difference at all. Since I'm fine with Liquid Glass, I tried this, shrugged at it, and never went back.

Your mileage may vary, as alongside this overall Liquid Glass slider, there are improvements to individual elements. So you could fill your time trying out variations on the appearance of Dock icons, and that might be worth it.

I say that particularly because while I haven't done any of that appearance fiddling, Apple has. This is just me, I realise, but somehow through the betas I kept mistaking the Preview icon for the Keynote one.

They're not even really that close, but something about them kept tripping me up. Then in the latest betas and now in the final release, Apple has changed the Preview icon and I no longer choose the wrong one.

Mind you, I prefer the previous Preview icon.

One other change during the beta process was that Apple removed the old toggle for turning off Apple Intelligence. I wondered at first whether that meant everyone was stuck with Apple Intelligence, but there is now a Turn Off Siri control which may do the same thing.

I wouldn't know, really, because originally I wasn't bothered by Apple Intelligence in any sense of the term. And now, specifically because of Siri AI, and specifically because of how it is on the Mac, Apple Intelligence is part of my daily workflow and I've no interest in turning it off.

Shortcuts

While Shortcuts works across the iPhone and iPad as well, I am most often creating them on the Mac. Which means my second favorite aspect of macOS Golden Gate is how Apple Intelligence has changed Shortcuts and made it much quicker to use.

Unfortunately, for several years, the Shortcuts action to open a Safari tab group has failed on the Mac. It works fine on the iPhone and the iPad where it's of little use, since you're already tapping on the screen.

On the Mac, it would be so convenient to press a keystroke or tap a Stream Deck button to switch between Tab Groups. And you were supposed to be able to do exactly that.

You still can't, and some time in the last few beta test versions, Apple implemented a kind of solution. It removed the Open Tab Group action from the Mac.

It's unfathomable why Apple couldn't make this work when it added the action. But it's more unfathomable why the new Shortcuts will pretend to do it.

Seriously. It's a bad part of what is otherwise a brilliant feature, which is the Apple Intelligence version of Shortcuts.

Previously, Shortcuts would offer countless actions that you could drag into a list which it would then work through. You can still do this and you can still create complex Shortcuts by hand.

But Apple has added Apple Intelligence to the simple plus button that gets you started. Once you click that, Shortcuts just asks you what you want to do, then it does the job of choosing the actions and assembling the Shortcut to do it.

There are times when this is so good that it is amazing and you think you'll never fashion a Shortcut manually again. For instance, there's a timing thing I need for the AppleInsider podcast and I could never quite work out the math, but Shortcuts did it immediately.

Yet there are times, such as with the Safari tab groups example, where Shortcuts will tell you that it has done what you asked. It will present a concise list of what precisely that Shortcut will do for you, even if it will not do anything of the sort.

It's not surprising that there are limits, of course. But it is surprising that there are these failures when sometimes Shortcuts will display an error message saying it can't do a particular thing.

So Apple Intelligence in Shortcuts is like Apple Intelligence in Siri AI. Absolutely fantastic, except when it's pants.

Nonetheless, the ability to incredibly quickly make at least basic Shortcuts by just saying what you want, that's transformative. More Mac users will get into Shortcuts because of this.

And while I actually enjoy writing Shortcuts for myself, most of the time now I do start by asking for what I want. Of the last 20 Shortcuts I've made, all of them started this way, although 5 failed.

That's still a 75% success rate, which could well be better than my own.

Just as on iOS 27, macOS Golden Gate also includes Image Playground and it has been improved. I've not used it once for serious work, but I do see the improvement.

That's because for some reason, and who knows why, I once asked the previous version to create an image of five clowns carrying a horse. That version gave me too few clowns, too many horses, and looked dreadful.

Trying the same prompt now, the image is vastly better and there is only one horse. But for some reason there are seven clowns. They seem happy.

What I have used for actual work is the way that Photos can now edit images. I was making a poster for my YouTube channel and needed more space for the text, so I had Photos extend my image.

It took moments. Open Photos, pop the image in, choose Edit, Tools, Extend, and then drag across where you want to widen the image. It didn't take Photos much longer to do the job.

And let this be proof of how well it did it. I did this a couple of months ago and staring at my YouTube channel, I cannot now remember or even guess which poster I did this with.

That was a real use-case for me, but I did experiment with the other photo manipulation features early on in the beta and originally had more limited results. So limited that I did not again try reframing a shot to move someone's eyeline, and I did not try to erase large sections of the image ever again.

Until just now. Trying it out again now, the results are staggeringly better than they were.

It must depend on the shot, but I had one of me and my wife in Vancouver, sitting against a glass partition in that city's great Apple Store. For obvious privacy reasons, I just now used Clean Up to remove my wife and I tell you, if we ever divorce, I'm going to use this instead of cutting up all our printed photos.

Clean Up removed her, and filled in the space not with some generic background, but what looks to me like what really was originally behind her. It has taken a sliver of an Apple Watch poster and recreated that, plus put some of those Apple Store wooden cube seats there.

But then I reframed it because for some reason I wasn't quite looking at the camera. It's like I thought I was a YouTube presenter or something.

There was only a slight reframing adjustment needed, but it did it. It did it with finer controls than there were and, most importantly for me, it did it so well that it truly looks like I was staring into the camera.

But to do that, I noticed that it filled in some more of the background around the edge of the frame. So I tried telling it to extend more and I chose the most difficult part.

In this shot, I am leaning into frame from the left, so I extended it out in that direction. And Photos made up my arm and jacket perfectly.

I'm still going to tell people to look into the lens, please. But what seemed like a toy at the start of the beta test is now a usable, potentially useful feature.

This bothers me because it's creating some material and I never imagined I'd do that. I'm certainly not going to be using macOS Golden Gate's Siri AI to write anything.

Although... It's now 31 years since Microsoft Word added red underlining for spell-checking and that means for three decades I've barely paid any attention to it. That's an exaggeration, but it's definitely true of the blue underlines you get when Word is bored and decides to make up grammar rules.

Yet during the beta test of macOS Golden Gate, I've been more conscious of Writing Tools. Never the actual feature, I don't think I've opened those more than once, but the gentle automatic underlining as I type has been rather good.

Plus there was a time when, as I'm in England, I wasn't certain of the US spelling of a word. I called up Spotlight, asked Siri AI, and it told me I'd got it wrong, which was helpful.

Every time, too, I can type "Fix it" into Siri AI and it does, it amends my text. Once it just did that anyway: told me it was wrong, corrected it in my document and said "you're welcome."

Okay, it didn't say that, but it was still startling to see it happen. I don't understand why it did this that once, but even being able to ask it to fix the spelling of one specific word seems good to me.

Fantastic, staggering, and dreadful

You can tell I like macOS Golden Gate and you won't be remotely surprised to learn that I do not want to go back to macOS Tahoe. But it isn't all brilliant, and there are annoyances even beyond the peculiar problems with Shortcuts.

I say annoyances. Some are minor and actually I'm certain they are only because I'm writing this while still on one of the last betas. There's a bug right now about when you scrub through a video; the slider keeps snapping back to the start, for instance, and that will surely be fixed.

Or there is that great feature when you're saving a document and can click on the name of an existing one. That copies the existing name and you can just make some changes.

So I'll have video assets such as "Take 1" and can just replace that digit with 2 rather than typing out the whole name. That's been a thing on the Mac for as long as I can remember, but in the last betas it was working too quickly.

I would be in the Save dialog, move to a new folder, and find that my document title was immediately changed to that of something already there. It always seems to happen when I've taken the time to write a new document title, too, and that gets wiped out.

Similarly, a bug I've had that appears to still be here is that menus in Save dialogs won't always work. In Pixelmator Pro, for instance, I can't always specify that I want to export an image as PNG instead of JPEG because the menu flips back closed too quickly.

But if there were one Mac thing I would wish Apple would fix... no, okay, one thing other than Shortcut tab group support, it is the Phone app.

This should be extraordinarily useful. To be able to make and receive calls on the Mac without getting out your iPhone, it should be so very handy.

But it does not work.

There has been one minor improvement. Originally it was that despite any other sound setting on your Mac, the Phone app had its own. It would sometimes even default to something you no longer had connected.

True, once you knew it did this ridiculous thing, you could change the audio setting. Once you also knew that to change anything to do with audio, though, you had to look under the Video menu.

This is now better. That same menu has been retitled Audio. Although while that lets me specify what microphone and speaker I want on one Mac, on another it won't. It just snaps back to whatever it was set to by default.

But it doesn't help even when you can set these. I have the correct microphone and speaker selected in it, but if I call someone, they cannot hear me.

I'd obviously like that to be fixed, please, and I struggle to understand why the problem hasn't been resolved yet. But then maybe I'm just a heavier phone user than most.

Only, since I am, I would also like to be able to answer or end calls with a keystroke or a Stream Deck button. As it is, I have to wait for the call notification to appear, then find the green answer button.

That notification is now appearing quicker than it did, so it's no longer the case that people have hung up before it's displayed. But clicking on that green answer button is a lottery because sometimes it just does not respond.

You could blame my hand/eye coordination, except for this. I went to the trouble of making a Keyboard Maestro macro and including in it a screenshot of that button.

Now I press a Stream Deck button, it launches that macro, Keyboard Maestro looks for the button, finds it, clicks it, and nothing happens.

I'd phone Apple to ask them about it, but...

Devils and details

The more you dig into anything, the more likely you are to find problems. I'm conscious that in the case of macOS Golden Gate, what are truly small irritations still manage to burrow under my skin.

I think you can rightly criticize me for that, it is surely a sign that I need to get out more. But perhaps it's also a sign of how important macOS is to me.

If you are a Mac user, it has always been astounding how much you can do with these devices. I've a relative who believes I am a computer geek because I'll spend 15 hours in front of my Mac, but to me that's not what I'm doing at all.

I'm writing articles, I'm editing video, I'm reading books, I am doing countless things that I need and enjoy and relish. A new macOS is just about the only thing that touches every part of that, every application, and every task.

So a new macOS is an enormous deal. And while I initially thought that Siri AI was the sole update in macOS Golden Gate, I do now see that there is more.

It's still the main update and it's still fantastic. But overall macOS Golden Gate is yet another example of how Apple makes you wonder why you put up with the previous version at all.