Apple Intelligence and Siri AI have sucked most of the oxygen out of the room at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this year—understandable, maybe, given that the AI-powered Siri delays are all anyone has wanted to ask any Apple executive about for the last two years.
But Apple Intelligence is just one of the three big focus areas Apple outlined during its keynote this week. The second is new parental controls—overdue, but promising-looking, as the parent of a 6-year-old with an iPad that I only begrudgingly connect to the Internet. And the third is “platform improvements,” a catch-all for a wide range of fit-and-finish changes aimed at boosting responsiveness and addressing common user complaints.
I have the first beta of macOS 27 Golden Gate running on an M1 MacBook Air—the oldest, slowest hardware Apple supports now that Intel compatibility is out the window. With some help from Apple’s densely packed wall-of-features slide, here are a few things from the “platform improvements” column I like the most, plus one item I’d still like to see.
Note that these are screenshots from an early beta and that things will continue to change as Apple releases more updates. Later betas, particularly those released after the public beta in July, will more closely resemble the finished version of the OS we get in the fall.
Liquid Glass and other UI changes #
Apple doesn’t retreat from Liquid Glass in macOS Golden Gate, but it does tone down the effect in a few places while reverting to a more Big Sur-ish design in a couple of crucial areas.
The most prominent tweak is the slider in the Appearance settings that gives users fine-grained control over Liquid Glass’ opacity. This replaces the binary “Clear/Tinted” toggle that Apple added in the macOS 26.1 release, and it has been added to the macOS setup flow so users can choose what they want when they upgrade their operating system or get a new Mac.