MacOS 27 Golden Gate: The most important new features

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

Another interesting implementation of Apple Intelligence is within the Shortcuts app. Application received Some AI 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 manual work to link functions within apps together. Apple’s example was that you could write, “When I leave work, calculate the ETA, and send it to Pedro,” which would use a combination of maps and messaging.

Other updates include using natural language when creating an event in the calendar, which will then populate the details with contacts or locations. Image Playground has also received a major update, which is now based on Google’s Gemini image creation technology. It can now create realistic images, and seems much 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.

Modifications 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 represents a major change in the way all UI elements appear, and in macOS Golden Gate, these UI elements are improved. Reply Complaints about inability to decode and cluttered menus, macOS now has a refraction effect in its transparency, blocking out background content more strongly and making foreground text easier to read. This can be customized in the system settings, allowing you to change the transparency level using a slider.

Apple has also made some smaller improvements to the visual identity of macOS. The toolbar now has a unified menu, the sidebars extend right to the edge of the window and the icons inside the sidebars gain color again. Perhaps my most requested feature is that each window has the same corner radius for the window control buttons.

In addition to visuals, Apple says it has also made improvements to responsiveness, such as memory usage, CPU usage, screen display, and app switching. One example on Mac is that navigating between Spaces is now smoother, as is opening Mission Control.