GoKawiilis a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021.
I turned off Siri on the Mac years ago and never looked back. Similarly, I found Apple Intelligence so fruitless I never engage with it. But the new Siri AI coming to macOS 27 Golden Gate has at least got me slightly rethinking things.
I’m still early in testing Siri AI, as I’ve only had access to it in the macOS 27 developer beta for little more than 24 hours. It’s also in an early preview state on the dev beta, so there should be lots of runway for improvements before it releases later this year. I don’t even know if it’s done indexing my files and folders on our review unit M5 MacBook Air and M5 Max MacBook Pro. Unlike on the iOS 27 dev beta, there’s no “indexing in progress” box in the settings page. I asked Siri if it could tell me, but it told me to click a button in Settings that isn’t there.
My colleagues got a headstart testing Siri AI on the iPhone and Apple Watch, and getting a read on its general vibe, and they’ve so far had some positive feedback from using it. My feelings are a little more mixed.
A frequent reminder that Siri AI is in early preview on a macOS developer beta. I get a fair amount of these.
When I sit down at a laptop I don’t need a voice assistant for searching things I’m randomly curious about or checking the weather like I would on a phone; I can do that faster and more accurately with keyboard and mouse. So I tried to think of ways to let Siri AI help me on macOS — things that might actually be useful to me in my everyday work.
I’d be happy to automate some of the time-consuming benchmarking I do when reviewing laptops, but although Siri AI can launch apps, it can’t take actions inside them (not that Apple ever claimed it could). I then tried to see if vibe coding a couple Shortcuts could get me there instead. This isn’t a Siri AI feature, but it is a new part of Apple Intelligence. I asked Shortcuts to run a test in either Geekbench or Cinebench, capture the results in a screenshot, wait a few minutes, and repeat the process two more times. But the resulting automations couldn’t actually run the tests either. Apple Intelligence made a shortcut that opened Geekbench and took screenshots (but forgot about actually running the benchmark), and it made a Cinebench shortcut that had “Wait for you to run the test” as an actual step. Maybe if developers continue expanding App Intents this could one day work.
Something important is missing here. This Shortcut feels passive aggressive.
So if Siri can’t help me run my benchmarks, maybe it can at least help me be a little faster in logging the data. In my normal workflow, I run each benchmark three times, taking screenshots as I go, and later average out the results before cataloging them in a spreadsheet. Apple’s WWDC keynote showed someone using Ask Siri in Spotlight to analyze data in local files. So I tried selecting batches of those screenshots in Finder and asking Siri to calculate the average scores for me. It worked pretty well — most of the time.
It was smart enough to distinguish single-core CPU scores from multicore CPU scores and GPU scores, average the test results, and arrange them in easy-to-read tables. But it could get thrown off if I included screenshots of too many different types of tests, especially if I mixed ones with synthetic score results (Geekbench, PugetBench, etc.) and time-based results (Blender render tests and our 4K video export test). And it sometimes got thrown off by the CPU rankings data that’s visible in Cinebench screenshots. Ideally, I’d be able to have Siri AI accurately calculate the 15 or so averages from my dozens of screenshots all at once — that would save me some serious time. But for now, it can at best only help me a little bit. And unless it gets better I’m still inclined to continue doing it all myself, especially since Siri messed up the numbers a couple times by pulling the wrong data.
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