macOS Golden Gate review beta

Thank goodness for Siri AI, because if the only updates with macOS Golden Gate were the other ones shown at WWDC, this would be the weakest release in history.

As it is, the new macOS Golden Gate is a significant and even dramatic update, but solely because of how useful Siri AI is. True, there is more to the update than Apple said, but all it mentioned was a Liquid Glass refinement, improved curves on windows, and a reworking of the sidebar.

If that sounds like only an incredibly little difference from macOS Tahoe, it’s actually even smaller than you think. That Liquid Glass refinement is a slider to let users control how translucent it is, but it works across such a narrow range that it’s not worth bothering with.

So Siri AI is the star and even in its very first form, it is already so very close to excellent. Every year there comes a moment when the previous macOS seems amazingly old, and this time it’s when you first use Siri AI.

It’s the feature you immediately adopt and that when you turn to a Mac without it, you miss it. Siri AI truly is a dramatic improvement, although it is far from perfect.

macOS Golden Gate beta review — Siri AI wins

I did wonder whether it would be hard to use the new Siri AI because I’m so used to how it used to work. I’m used to asking one thing at a time, then muttering when Siri gets it wrong, and asking it again, then sarcastically saying thank you.

With the new Siri, though, the first thing I thought of was to ask about a concert I booked a year or more ago. I didn’t remember the date, and I could have searched my calendar, but I also wasn’t sure whether the tickets were being kept at the box office.

So I just asked Siri when I am seeing Dar Williams, and also where the tickets are. It pretty immediately showed me the date, the venue, and the email that had the tickets in.

It took Siri AI thirty seconds to check my calendar and find a specific email buried deep in my archive.

Just as I could have searched my calendar, of course, I could have searched my emails but I didn’t know if the tickets were there. Plus you know how long it takes to find anything in Mail, so having this close to instant result is a genuinely useful boon.

Similarly, as much as I like Apple Maps, I find it a bit irritating when I’m just looking up a place instead of trying to find a route. But then also when I want a route with multiple stops, it’s not as if it’s hard, but it’s now so much easier to ask Siri AI.

Consequently, I asked it for a route to a venue I have to speak at, arriving at a certain time on a specific day, and also including a stop at a colleague’s home to pick up various things for the event. It just did it.

I have a long drive ahead of me. But Siri AI made finding a multi-stop route very quick.

Or rather, it eventually just did it. No question, Siri AI is superb, but sometimes it has frozen on me, sometimes it has said it can’t do something. It has taken me three goes on occasion, but it has then worked.

macOS Golden Gate beta review — Siri AI failings

Part of the problem is that Siri AI is now in Spotlight. In most ways, that is superb. Instead of being off in some separate Talk to Siri feature, it’s now right there where you might spend much of your time anyway.

But as you type, Spotlight will go through figuring out whether you’re looking for a document, or an application. Sometimes it is poor at realizing that you want to ask Siri AI a question.

For some reason, though, there is a solution. Once you’ve typed your question, you can hold down the Command key and that tells Spotlight you want to Ask Siri.

I have not one thin clue how I stumbled across that, but I’m using it a lot now and it never fails. And I am also using Siri AI much more than I expected. If I want anything that is on my Mac, I’ll ask Siri AI and while this might just be that it’s a new toy, it really feels as if it’s already part of my workflow.

However, if I ask for something that requires what Apple calls “World Knowledge,” Siri AI stops being excellent. It becomes much more like any other AI, and sometimes it isn’t as good as them.

So for instance, when I start researching an article, I will now routinely do a search for every time I’ve written on AppleInsider about the same topic before. Google was never all that use for this, but Claude AI is excellent at surfacing them.

Siri AI is not. It doesn’t always find the articles I want, and sometimes it will find some but not include any links. I’ve seen this with all AI chatbots and am used to sighing and typing “prove it.”

But in the last such search I did with Siri AI, it did provide links but the first one I tried went to the wrong site. It was the right topic, but the article shown wasn’t on AppleInsider and wasn’t written by me.

That is typical of AI search results. Only, that same search did surface notes I’d made on the topic for a previous podcast recording. I’d entirely forgotten those, and Siri AI found them.

If something is on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, then Siri AI is superb. If it’s on the web, it’s not always so hot.

macOS Golden Gate beta review — more Apple Intelligence

It used to be that there was a section in System Settings called “Siri and Apple Intelligence.” That has now changed to just Siri.

So it appears as if there is no longer a switch to turn off Apple Intelligence. It’s not clear yet whether turning off Siri will do that too.

It is clearer that Apple is trying to put some water between Siri and the rest of Apple Intelligence, because there are AI features that are separate. At present, you have to join a waitlist to get Siri AI, but even before you get the new Siri, there are many Apple Intelligence features in macOS Golden Gate.

For instance, if you open an image in the Photos app, choose Edit, and then click on Tools, you now get the options to reframe or extend the image that Apple demonstrated. With the right sort of image, extension is excellent.

The original photograph of me looking grumpy for no reason.

I took a close-up shot of myself against a wooden background, and in moments that background was far wider. Not only did it successfully duplicate the background, it also edited it. So seeing that there was light on one side of my face, it lit that edge of the frame as if there were a window just out of shot.

It also interpreted my stony face as being annoyed, so it gave me folded arms. That felt weird, but it didn’t look wrong.

Reframing of that same image worked, too, or at least mostly. It’s a more limited tool than it seemed in the WWDC keynote, but it did allow me to tilt my head and whole body back, as if I had taken a low-angle shot.

The same shot but with the background greatly extended. Sometimes when I try this, Photos also adds in folded arms.

If I shifted the frame to the left or right, it also worked. But along the way it briefly gave me an extended neck.

So it really does depend on your image, because you are as likely as not to get terrible distortion.

Still, I often create poster images for various projects and being able to extend the background will be a boon. It will mean I can have space to add a headline, for instance.

Photos can now turn the subject to the side, although apparently it can’t make me more cheeful.

That will be an occasional thing I do, it hasn’t so immediately become part of my daily workflow as Siri AI has. But then there is one other macOS feature that has definitely changed how I work, at least most of the time.

It’s the new natural language Shortcuts, the way that you can describe what you want and the Shortcuts app will create it for you. When it works, I cannot see any reason you’d make Shortcuts any other way.

If only it worked all the time.

macOS Golden Gate beta — Shortcuts are mixed

If you open the Shortcuts app on Mac, iPhone, or iPad now, you get a prominent New Shortcut button. Choose that and you are asked to describe what you want.

On the Mac, you practically have to dodge around that button to get anything done manually. It is that prominent and Apple is clearly pushing this verbal Shortcuts.

The prompt for you to describe a Shortcut you want is even more prominent the first time you open the app,

But then this is a change that will surely introduce more people to Shortcuts, and it’s only one extra step to go around it to manually writing them as before.

However, the results might also put newcomers off because Shortcuts now has that AI-style certainty of what it’s doing, even when it’s wrong. When it is right, though, it is very impressive.

On my iPhone, for instance, I asked for a Shortcut that would change my wallpaper at 6pm every weekday, and as well as doing that, it also set up the automation to run it.

Then on the Mac, I have long wanted a Shortcut that would do some work on my AppleInsider podcast notes. During the show, I’ll tap on my Stream Deck Pedal whenever there’s to be a new chapter, for instance, and I have that send the current time to a note.

But it’s the current running time in minutes, and I then edit in Final Cut Pro, whose time is in hours, minutes, and seconds. So I keep having to stop to think whether 119 minutes is really one hour 59 minutes, or whatever.

I’ve wanted that shortcut that would take 119 minutes and write it out as 01:59:00, and it has always defeated me. Not any more. I asked Shortcuts to do it, and it did.

Note the large icon to the rear where Shortcuts says what it has done, and then in the foreground, what it’s actually produced.

I then asked for various refinements to get the result copied to the clipboard, and it did that, too.

It is really very good, and so very easy that I initially thought there was no possibility that I would ever again want to write a Shortcut by hand. I was an immediate and total convert to the new way of doing them.

That didn’t last.

For years, I’ve also wanted a Shortcut that would switch Tab Groups in Safari and it’s always been impossible on the Mac. You can do it on iPhone and iPad, there is a Shortcuts action to do it, but it’s always fallen over with an “internal error” on the Mac.

So when Shortcuts next asked me what I wanted, I told it, and it did it. It stopped to ask me which Tab Group I wanted, then it presented me with the finished Shortcut including a full description of what it does.

It doesn’t work. It isn’t even close.

If you go into the Shortcut manually, you can see that instead of anything to do with Tab Groups, it’s trying to turn on Do Not Disturb. It doesn’t even reference the specific Tab Group it asked me about.

Incidentally, if you write a Shortcut manually and include the action to change Tab Groups, it still fails as it now has for years and years. There is progress of a sort, though, as in macOS Golden Gate, instead of an unspecific “internal error,” it says it cannot communicate with the app.

Which is a clue both to my problem and to where Apple is putting its attention. Because what’s probably happening is that behind all of this verbal and even manual Shortcut writing, the app is using AppleScript. This is the decades-old automation that can let you do just about anything on a Mac.

But AppleScript works by every app providing access to its features, specifically by providing what’s called a dictionary. You can open the Safari dictionary in Script Editor, and if you do, you’ll see that there’s nothing there to do with tab groups.

So it appears that Apple’s newest natural language Shortcuts tools fail because Apple’s oldest automation technology hasn’t been updated.

It would also appear that Shortcuts has that curse of AI, that inability to say it can’t do something. Except sometimes, it will say exactly that, such as when you try to use it to fix irritations with the Phone app.

macOS Golden Gate beta — Phone app

With macOS Tahoe, Apple brought the Phone app to the Mac and it seemed like it was going to be so useful. If someone calls, you would just answer it on the Mac as you work. If you need to call someone, you would just do it on the Mac without getting out your iPhone.

I had issues that my Mac Studio wasn’t displaying the phone call notification fast enough to stop people hanging up on me. But even if the on-screen notification had appeared at the same time as the ringing sound begins, the green answer button wouldn’t always react to a click.

Nobody can hear you when you use the Phone app on the Mac, unless you know to look under the Video menu to choose the same audio source you’ve already set everywhere else.

What I’d really like is a keystroke to answer a call, and then another keystroke to end it. There is no such keystroke, and while you can add your own to just about anything on the Mac, you can’t with the Phone app.

You also cannot write or describe a Shortcut that answers for you. If you could, you could attach that Shortcut to, say, a Stream Deck button, but you can’t.

And this is one case where the new Shortcuts says no. “I can’t create shortcuts for physical actions like answering a phone call,” it says.

So there is some error-trapping in the new Shortcuts, but it doesn’t know to say it can’t do other things, like the Safari tab groups.

But then maybe we shouldn’t expect the Phone app to be useful, because with macOS Tahoe, it seemed as if Apple abandoned it part way. By default, for example, no one could hear you when you used it to make or answer a call, which seems fundamental.

It turns out that regardless of any Sound settings you have, you have to expressly tell the Phone app to use a given microphone. And you tell it this via a menu called Video.

A phone app has a video menu. That hasn’t changed with macOS Golden Gate.

macOS Golden Gate beta — visual changes

Something that has changed with the new macOS is how the Mac looks. It’s so subtle with adjustments such as the Liquid Glass slider that it might as well not be there, but it is.

It’s not much more pronounced with app icons, but it does make a difference. App icons in the Dock do seem to pop, and it means that transparent ones are clearer, too.

There’s also how menus have shed their mass of icons. With macOS Tahoe, every menu item had its own icon and the result was a mess, but calmness has now been restored.

All of which is good and all of which is welcome, but overall this really would be an incredibly slight update if it weren’t for Siri AI.

Still, up to now, Siri has felt like it was really just for the iPhone and maybe also the iPad. With the Mac, because your hands are already on the keys, it seemed quicker to just type instead of interrupt your work to talk to Siri.

Now Siri somehow feels much more a part of the Mac, and that by itself means that macOS Golden Gate is a significant update.

macOS Golden Gate beta — Pros

• Siri AI for any information on your Mac is fantastic
• Natural language Shortcuts are usually brilliant
• Photos app improvements can be superb, depending on the image
• Minor visual updates are welcome

macOS Golden Gate beta — Cons

• Siri AI World Knowledge is poor
• Liquid Glass control is very limited
• Natural language Shortcuts is sometimes just wrong
• Years-old Shortcuts error remains
• Phone app still feels abandoned

macOS Golden Gate beta review rating: 4 out of 5