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.
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The macOS 27 Golden Gate public beta is here, and anyone with an M-series Mac now has easier access to test-drive Apple’s latest changes — including a more subdued Liquid Glass aesthetic. That’s reason enough to be at least a little excited for macOS 27 (particularly if you’re on Tahoe and disliking all the transparency). But there are other things that make trying out this beta a little more appealing than usual.
There was a rumor earlier this year that this new macOS would focus on performance optimizations, bug fixes, and a bunch of small quality-of-life improvements, rather than being a major overhaul. And aside from dialing down Liquid Glass, that is what Golden Gate feels like. Apple even leaned into this during its WWDC keynote with a wall of text listing such boring but practical tweaks as “Optimized CPU scheduler” and “Support for Mac mirroring in 5K resolution.”
The Golden Gate developer beta has proven stable in my everyday use on an M5 MacBook Air and M5 Max MacBook Pro, which is notable since dev betas often have side effects like tanking battery life or causing hardware to run hotter than normal. So if you’re interested in trying the public beta yourself (if you’re comfortable with the potential for bugs) let me walk you through a few new features — both good and middling alike.
Apple’s wall of words from the keynote, showing all the little changes it’s bringing to Golden Gate and its other operating systems. Image: Apple
The good stuff
As I covered in my initial developer beta hands-on, the new dialed-down Liquid Glass design, unified corner window radii, and visual improvements to File Explorer / app sidebars are all absolute wins for Golden Gate. Would I still prefer to go back to the flatter design of macOS Sequoia? Yes, unequivocally. But at least Liquid Glass is more tolerable and less distracting now. When the full Golden Gate release comes out in the fall, I’ll tell everyone I know running Tahoe to upgrade right away.
Siri’s new Expressive Voices are now available in preview as of dev beta 3. In addition to the existing canned voices, the public beta of macOS 27 allows you to customize the pacing and expressiveness of Siri’s speech. For now, it’s limited to a female and male American accent with five levels of pace and expressivity each.
Siri’s new Expressive Voices menu. I’m locking my sliders this way forever.
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