Apple's macOS Golden Gate brings a Liquid Glass slider and faster performance, leaves Intel Macs behind

Apple named macOS 27 "Golden Gate" at WWDC today, and Craig Federighi did it via a fake handover note from the marketing team, who'd allegedly piled into a VW microbus and motored north before telling him. That bit of theatre aside, the actual release is the first macOS in six years to cut Intel Macs loose entirely. M-series chips and the A18 Pro-powered MacBook Neo only.

Federighi pitched Golden Gate as a sweat-the-details year, and the numbers back that up. Apps open up to 30% faster, photos hit your library up to 70% faster after you take them, AirDrop is up to 80% faster, and shifting files to an external drive is now five times quicker—roughly Finder-on-Mac speeds, Apple claims. A reworked CPU scheduler does the heavy lifting underneath.

A Liquid Glass dial, finally, for everyone who hated Tahoe's translucency

Apple heard the complaints about Tahoe's translucent overhaul, and Shubham Kedia made a point of saying so on stage. There's now a transparency slider that runs from completely clear to fully tinted, so you pick your poison. Sidebars stretch to the edge of the window with refraction continuing underneath them, sidebar icons keep their colour, and every window shares the same corner radius—even apps that haven't been updated. App icons pick up extra Liquid Glass layers built directly into the artwork.

A rebuilt search index for Spotlight, Photos and Mail

The plumbing behind Spotlight, Photos and Mail has been rearchitected. New stuff gets indexed almost immediately rather than disappearing into the void for hours, and a full reindex runs once after you update. Should fix the "why can't Finder find this file I made twenty minutes ago" problem that's dogged Tahoe.

Siri AI lands on the Mac too—the Gemini-collaborated version, with onscreen awareness, personal context, and its own app. It's wired into Spotlight, so you can summon it from the same place you'd hunt for a file. Right-click on any window or item to ask Siri about it directly, or select multiple files in Finder and have it compare them for you. Conversation history syncs across devices via iCloud, so a thread you start on the Mac picks up on the iPhone or Watch.

Beta's out today for developers, with the public release due in September.