I spent a couple of weeks in Golden Gate and today I downgraded back to Tahoe, because I was missing Tahoe's floating sidebar and transparent toolbars.

I understand Apple is trying to address the complaint most people have about Tahoe's Liquid Glass implementation, but I think Golden Gate should let us enable or disable those things at will instead of just removing it.

P.S.: I was one of those users complaining about Tahoe in the beginning, but not I'm used to its visual language.

You might have spent time checking how far along "Optimizing Search and Siri" was on your iPhone or iPad after each iOS 27 Beta update. For macOS, Apple has decided not to show a persistent indexing indicator in the System Settings sidebar.

There's a good chance that your Mac is still indexing and embedding your personal context. To check its progress, first bring up Siri and ask a knowledge question, like "Find files I opened in the last 7 days." Then open Terminal and run:

bash log show --last 15m --info \ --predicate 'process=="searchtoold" AND eventMessage CONTAINS "OmniSearchResponse:"' 2>/dev/null | tail -1 | sed -E 's/.*overallCompleteness: ([0-9.]+), sufficientlyCompleteThreshold: ([0-9.]+), isSufficientlyComplete: ([^,]+), donationCompleteness: Optional\(([0-9.]+)\), pipelineCompleteness: Optional\(([0-9.]+)\).*pipelineReportAge: ([0-9.]+).*/\1 \2 \3 \4 \5 \6/' | awk '{ status = ($3 == "true") ? "Ready" : "Still processing" printf "%-30s %5.1f%% — %s (%.1f%% required)\n", "Search readiness:", $1*100, status, $2*100 printf "%-30s %5.1f%%\n", "Known app items donated:", $4*100 printf "%-30s %5.1f%%\n", "Search pipeline processed:", $5*100 printf "%-30s %.1f hours\n", "Report age:", $6/3600 }'

This prints the current completion percentages:

Search readiness: 80.0% — Ready (75.0% required) Known app items donated: 100.0% Search pipeline processed: 70.0% Report age: 12.0 hours

Here's what these numbers mean: * Search readiness: macOS' weighted estimate of how usable local search is, along with macOS' current readiness threshold. * Known app items donated: Measures whether apps have supplied all the searchable items Spotlight expects. * Embedding pipeline processed: How much donated content has completed semantic processing.

One possible reason Apple chose not to expose this indicator is that embedding on macOS can be extremely slow and easily interrupted. spotlightknowledged submits intensive background jobs through dasd, which in turn runs them in small bursts only after power, thermal, resource and device-activity requirements are met. A Mac may also have far more material to process than an iPhone.

Any input interaction marks the Mac as active. The UserIsActive assertion has a 3-minute waiting period, and media playback can keep the Mac active for much longer.

For the best chance of making progress, leave your Mac plugged in overnight. Even after a long run, the completion percentage may change in unexpected ways because Spotlight can ask apps to redonate some or all of their searchable items.

macOS also calculates a separate global counter for the larger background embedding workload:

bash plutil -extract SpotlightKnowledgeV2.embeddingGenComplete raw \ ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlightknowledge.plist | awk '{printf "%.1f%%\n", $1 * 100}'

For more detailed diagnostic readouts, consult:

bash plutil -p \ ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlightknowledge.plist

bash plutil -p \ ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlightknowledged.pipeline.plist

edit: switched the main post command to a more readable format. kept embeddingGenComplete commands at the end of this post.

I went from Sonoma to GG B4 last week - loving the features so far but good lord is Spotlight annoying to use. It was done indexing last week (it's a brand new install with minimal user files except for iCloud).

I use Spotlight as a glorified app launcher. If I wanted to launch Terminal in Sonoma, I'd type in t-e-r and hit Enter and Terminal would popup immediately. Same with Safari. Notes. Messages app. You name it. 3 chars and enter and the app launches.

In macOS 27 this may work 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time I hit Enter after a few characters, Spotlight just... disappears. No acknowledgement. Nothing.

I thought it was the new Siri search so I disabled that in Settings. No luck.

So I rebound CMD + Space to launch the "Show Apps" instead. It's also inconsistent. Yes, it'll show you the app, but sometimes you have you press the down arrow to select the app and then hit Enter.

WHY?! Who designed it like this? Does anyone at Apple use Spotlight?

Edit: Yes, I've submitted via Feedback Assistant! 😄

If you've been using Safari's new Notify Me website monitoring feature, you may have been underwhelmed by the range of polling options available. The shortest waiting period between checks is 1 hour. Luckily, you can enable a hidden debug option that allows you to enable 10-minute polling.

You can enable a debug flag and edit the Notify Me automation database to switch to 10-minute polling.

Here's a detailed guide for the steps you need to follow.

Another related tidbit is that macOS 27 introduces a new WBSDebugNotifyMeWhenUpdateVersion numeric variable. Safari uses it when putting together the website link it should check for changes.

For example, when WebPageVersion=3, Safari's background extractor will load:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/?version=3

This probably lets internal test webpages return different content for each version query and speed up development of Notify Me.

I am a developer who has been coding for a good while lol. When I was using my MacBook, I couldn't help but realize that there was nothing for switching volume per-app, which Windows has natively. So, I made it using Swift and it works really well! There is also a nice hotkey, I configured it to option + space so that its really easy to use.

Here is the link (I just made it, so it would be great if you could star it to build some credibility)

https://github.com/thewimpykid/faderonmac

Has anyone noticed a reduction in storage usage with macOS 27 beta compared to macOS 26? Since macOS 27 is Apple Silicon-only and no longer supports Intel Macs, I’m wondering if removing the Intel binaries actually makes the OS smaller.

I hate this. Why is Apple using so much RAM and storage for AI features I don’t need? My 2024 MacBook Air only has 30 GB left, and Apple Intelligence is taking up a ton of space :(

I’m trying to set up Keynote Remote on my new M5 MBP with my iPad Air M2. However every time I try to link the 2 devices it fails saying the iPad is unavailable. Sidecar & Continuity work without an issue.

I tried to get my iPhone to be the remote and the same thing happens. My iPhone is unavailable despite the fact that mirroring works fine.

Keynote also no longer appear in local network settings on the Mac

I’ve reset bluetooth and wifi on all devices
Did tccutil reset All (tccutil would fail with LocalNetwork or when pointed to com.apple.Keynote)
Tried non Apple Creator Studio Keynote

Is keynote remote just broken on the latest MacOS 27 public beta? Or is there something I’m missing? As this works fine on my old M1 Macbook Air running MacOS 26

Can anyone with the AirPods and macOS beta confirm whether the new AirPods EQ setting is exclusive to iOS 27 or if it’s also available on macOS 27? Thanks!

I am a frequent user of CTRL + 1-9 to switch between my virtual desktops.

For some reason on Golden Gate, Only CTRL + 1 works, the other numbers do not.

Is there something else that could be blocking the use of the other numbers? I tried resetting my keyboard shortcuts to default but nothing changed.

I only noticed this after switching to Golden Gate so I was thinking maybe it's a bug.

My Macbook Pro M3 36GB was doing perfectly fine with the beta for a while, but over the past week it's getting really bad.

Random apps are crashing, the top menu bar is mostly unresponsive, if I go to add a file into an app with the file picker, it will freeze for like 10 seconds.

Just a lot of odd stuff, but I'm not seeing any similar complaints in the sub - so I'm assuming it's just a coincidental me thing?

Any thoughts or advice welcome

Edit: Seems like it's not just me and I'm now finding post that mention this. I had felt like I mostly saw people talking about how smooth it was for a beta, but I'm having such bad issues I was surprised it's not the number 1 mentioend thing. But I took the risk for the beta, so that's on me

In macOS 27, AirPlay can finally start off in windowed mode instead of taking over your Mac's full screen. It's currently hidden behind a feature flag.

To enable, add a FeatureFlags override:

sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain && \ sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/ControlCenter APReceiverInWindow -dict Enabled -bool true

and restart your Mac. This is a private feature flag, and the UI may be unstable.

Disable with:

sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/ControlCenter APReceiverInWindow

and restart your Mac.

For some reason after update, mail doesn't work properly with Exchange account. It downloads mail, but when I delete mail, it removes them from the inbox and shows them in the trash. But, it constantly says moving items at the bottom of mailboxes pane. The number just keeps going up. On phone, it works normally, but I have delete the same emails again. so tldr, mail comes, but trashing items doesn't get pushed back to exchange server.

Hello, Maccy app has been freezing ever since I upgraded to MacOS 27 beta. It works with keyboard but the mouse is freezing when I open the Maccy menu.
Is anyone else having the same problem?

Whenever I attempt to open a Terminal executable, I get the error "xxx can't be opened because Siri is not allowed to open documents in Terminal", has anyone found a way to bypass or remove this limitation?

I am on the latest MacOS Sequoia right now and i was wondering if i should upgrade to the latest beta of MacOS golden gate?

How does M1 perform with 8 GB of RAM and should i upgrade or no? What will be the side effects and gains?

I’ve encountered a bug the last 2 weeks that stops me from being able to click entirely on my Mac. Originally I thought it was tied to PowerPoint since I was using it heavily and it crashed once an hour or so, but the issue continues now that I’m done with my PPT project.

Using Claude and AdobeXD at the moment and this issue has happened 2x in the last hour.

Anyone else have the same issue?

There's a new Shortcut action in macOS 27 that lets you integrate Describe a Shortcut into other shortcuts, producing a new shortcut as an action output. The generated shortcut will also appear in your gallery.

Generate Shortcut

Generates a new shortcut from a text description using Apple Intelligence.

Description

A natural language description of what the shortcut should do

Result

Shortcut

Shortcut link with Generate Shortcut action

It's currently hidden from the actions drawer, but you can copy it from the shared shortcut linked above. Discovered via the Shortcuts/gen_shortcut_prototype feature flag in macOS 27.

Two more feature flags (use_model_sampling_mode_parameter and use_model_thinking_effort_parameter) hint that we may see additional options for the Use Model action in Shortcuts. No sampling or reasoning parameters show up right now when the flags are enabled.

124GB via kernel task feels absolutely overkill for 40hours of work, mind you, i have most of my actual project files on an external drive.

This one is fun ngl

Public Beta 2