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MacOS 27 Golden Gate will bring a host of changes to the Mac when it releases later this year, with its biggest new features revolving around… Siri AI. But for now, with the first developer beta, Siri AI is only being offered through a waitlist. So what’s available to try out is mostly about how the upcoming OS will look and feel.
You’re not greeted with any fanfare when you launch the macOS 27 beta (that’s likely to come later), but there’s reason to celebrate. Go to Appearance Settings, and you’ll find that Apple now has a Liquid Glass slider, allowing users to set the amount of transparency of the UI in macOS. On one end of the slider, it is transparent like liquid glass, and on the other end the transparent highlights are solidly frozen. The Golden Gate starts in the middle of the slider by default, just as a touch of decoration – perhaps a nice acknowledgment that the original theme has gone too far. It’s unfortunate that you can’t go completely opaque, but this frosted look greatly reduces the distracting elements of liquid glass.
After spending a short time with Golden Gate, I actually prefer the minimal transparency look. I will turn this slider on in the full version and never go back. For the staunchest liquid glass haters, the Reduce Transparency option is still available in the Accessibility settings, but using it is like taking a hammer to all that glass — introducing a lot of harsh gray and black backgrounds to the dock, menu bar, and Control Center.
The ultimate design wins for macOS 27 are the return of edge-to-edge sidebars with colored icons and increased corner radii for windows across the operating system. The first is basically a rollback of the way sidebars used to appear (which looked better and were easier to parse, while wasting less space). The latter is only logical. How did Apple manage to get so high with its design that it allowed windowed apps to have mismatched corners?
I have a few bugs – the new battery icon taken from iOS is less clear (I really hate it). Also, after Apple finally added the basic window capture feature in the Sequoia, they didn’t improve it one bit. Both Tahoe and now Golden Gate leave me wanting better and faster tiling control like Windows 11, as well as the simple ability to rename virtual desktops. But so far nothing.
Apple says Golden Gate is supposed to be faster, with faster search indexing. It’s too early to tell how much of a difference this makes on the MacBook Neo I’m testing it on — especially since development beta builds are known to be buggy and unstable. Using Spotlight search for local files on the Golden Gate, it performed similarly to another Neo I was using on a macOS 26 Tahoe. Opening apps on both systems side by side produced mixed results: Golden Gate opened Lightroom Classic and Slack faster, but Tahoe was quicker to open Photoshop and Steam. I’m hoping that Apple’s improvements to memory and CPU usage will really show up on the MacBook Neo, which can use all the efficiency it can get, but the jury is out at the moment.
There’s still more to come with more betas for macOS 27, where at some point we’ll be able to fully test Siri AI, visual intelligence, and the revamped Spotlight Search. last year A robust, user-focused Spotlight with clipboard history was a nice improvement, but I’m skeptical that incorporating Siri AI into Spotlight will be the game-changer Apple describes it as. I’ll keep an open mind and look forward to finding out once I get off the waiting list.
For now, I’m relieved that Apple is backing off Liquid Glass a bit. While the look wasn’t as bad on the Mac as it was on iOS, it’s a welcome change to be able to reject those transparencies and get a little closer to the old look from the Sequoia. This and other bits of UI polish are a nice upgrade in themselves. Now, Apple has to prove it can deliver on all the new AI features as well, and I’m excited to see how well they do.
