Apple officially named macOS 27 "Golden Gate" at WWDC today, with Craig Federighi announcing the release through a theatrical fake handover note from the marketing team, who allegedly piled into a VW microbus and motored north before informing him. Aside from that bit of stagecraft, the actual release marks the first macOS in six years to completely cut Intel Macs loose, supporting only M-series chips and the A18 Pro-powered MacBook Neo.
Performance Enhancements
Federighi pitched Golden Gate as a "sweat-the-details" year, and the numbers back that up. Applications open up to 30% faster, photos hit your library up to 70% faster after being taken, 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 performs the heavy lifting underneath these improvements.
Liquid Glass Slider
Apple heard the complaints about Tahoe's translucent overhaul, and Shubham Kedia made a point of acknowledging this on stage. There is now a transparency slider that runs from completely clear to fully tinted, allowing users to choose their preferred level of transparency. Sidebars stretch to the edge of the window with refraction continuing underneath them, sidebar icons retain their color, and every window shares the same corner radius—even apps that have not been updated. App icons pick up extra Liquid Glass layers built directly into the artwork.
Rebuilt Search Index
The plumbing behind Spotlight, Photos, and Mail has been rearchitected. New content gets indexed almost immediately rather than disappearing into the void for hours, and a full reindex runs once after you update. This should fix the "why can't Finder find this file I made twenty minutes ago" problem that has dogged Tahoe.
Siri AI Integration
Siri AI lands on the Mac as well—the Gemini-collaborated version, with onscreen awareness, personal context, and its own app. It is wired into Spotlight, so you can summon it from the same place you would search 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.
The developer beta is available today, with a public release expected in September.
