11 New Features In macOS Golden Gate That Are Not AI

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some of the new features in macOS Golden Gate that don't involve AI.

If you're seeing this before you get macOS Golden Gate think of this as a preview. If you've already got it here are some things you can look at that aren't AI. So clearly some of the most powerful new features in macOS Golden Gate are related in some way to AI or are just part of the new Siri AI. But there are new things that have nothing to do with it as well. 

So let's start off first for Controls you've now got for controlling how much transparency is involved with liquid glass. This is under System Settings, Appearance. You can use the slider here to go back and forth and change it to be Very Transparent, very glass-like or more of just a tinted look. So you can see here how it looks in the little preview it gives you but also we can see how it looks here in the Notification Center. Look around the clock you can see if that is very different. Also, you've got the same thing in the Dock too. The Dock itself becomes very transparent or just tinted as well.

Another big change is in Sidebars in the windows. There's a lot of small change in the windows themselves like how the corners are. But the Sidebars now are just back to regular sidebars as they were before macOS Tahoe. Not these little glass panes that sit inside of a sidebar. So you can see this here in various different apps and situations. 

Now there have been a lot of change made behind the scenes of how external displays are handled. So those of us that use a second or even third display know that sometimes when you connect or disconnect it the windows sometimes go back to the external displays and sometimes they don't. Also how spaces are handled sometimes works well and sometimes it doesn't. There's going to be major improvements with that. Hopefully we will see a difference if using multiple displays particularly if you're connecting or disconnecting a second display from your MacBook. In addition more resolutions will be handled so you should be able to see more options here. It depends on your external display though, I assume, and of course how you have it connected. For best results you probably should have a Display Port connection, not HDMI. In particular it looks like more resolutions will be available if you're one of the people that have the one of those ultra wide 5K displays. 

Now, Apple Music has a few new features. One of those is how artists pages look. So when you look at artists pages in previous versions of macOS there's kind of like a video portion at the top and then information under it. But now that kind of all melds together. In addition there's also a change in the auto-mixing, you know, that happens between songs and playlists. Some improvements there. I really like these features and am looking forward to it even working better. 

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Here's one that is hard to miss. You know in OS and iOS you can kind of swipe down to refresh a page, say, in Safari or somewhere else. Well you'll now be able to do that in Safari on the Mac and in other apps as well. So, for instance, in the Mail app you'll be able to swipe down using your trackpad or mouse to refresh the messages there, get new messages and such.

Now the Photos App has a bunch of new AI features. But in addition to that there's non-AI features as well, including with Shared Albums. Shared Albums now share full resolution versions of the photos, not lower resolution ones. There's this really new cool feature called Make Album Temporary. So we've all probably been in a situation where we want to share some photos right now and, you know, maybe coming back from a trip or something like that, and then years later you go to look to clean up your Photos App and notice those old shared albums are still there. You can set them for 30 days now and you can go in and change them when you manage the shared album as well. 

Also it should be possible now to invite Android and Windows users to view your Shared Albums. That is a specific invite. Previously you could do it pretty easily if you just made the album public, but now there is going to be a way where they can actually login and authenticate if you invite them whereas before only for iCloud users. 

Now here's a big new change in Notes. You can now draw in a note on your Mac. A lot of people really wanted this. Previously you could only draw on your iPhone or on your iPad and you could see those drawings on your Mac. But you couldn't actually create a new drawing on your Mac. But now you've got that functionality in Notes with a bunch of new tools, that kind of look like markup tools, but they actually look more like drawing tools on the iPad.

A behind the scenes change that I think will make a huge difference for people is Spotlight. The Spotlight Index which is this index that looks at all of your files and other data and gets it ready so it can be quickly searched and the search results show up in Spotlight or in Mail when you're searching or in the Finder when you're searching and all sorts of other places. That's been rebuilt. Now I've complained about this in the past that it really wasn't very reliable and  it was pretty slow, the indexing that is. So now there's a whole new indexing process that is supposed to be faster, more reliable and, yeah, the reason they built it like that is because AI is going to rely a lot on that Spotlight Index to get things done. But we will also benefit from it in regular searches. 

An interesting new feature available in the Freeform App is the ability to use Freeform in dark mode. So previously it was like this canvas where you're adding text and colors and things like that. It really didn't have a dark mode. But now if you put things on it, like say black text on a white background, but you switch to dark mode, that is you switch your whole Mac into dark mode in Control Center, you'll actually see now white text on a black background or a white shape on a black background rather than the opposite. You can switch back and forth. 

Now if you have used Sidecar with your Mac, that's the ability to have your iPad as a second display for your Mac. It's a really cool feature but it is kind of limited by the fact you can't really use the TouchScreen on your iPad. The idea you use your mouse or trackpad on your Mac and this is just an additional screen with a few extra buttons there. But now once you've updated not only your Mac to Golden Gate but also your iPad to iPadOS27 you'll be able to use the touch screen on your iPad and you can bring up menus, you can tap a button, and even you can drag to scroll inside of windows. 

Probably the most non-AI feature that people are most excited about is iPhone mirroring. Now that is not new but what is new is the ability to actually expand the size of your iPhone on your Mac's screen and you will actually see more of the app. Like, for instance, here's the Mail App. You can see the list on the left and the message on the right. Here's the Calendar App. You expand that and you can see you get this bigger view. Something not possible on your iPhone's screen. Here's another example using Safari and you can make that larger as well. So you can use this in all sorts of different apps and it's really interesting because before the main advantage of iPhone mirroring was to be able to access your iPhone without taking it out of your  pocket or using iPhone's screen while you've got this nice Mac keyboard and trackpad in front of you. But now you actually have another reason to use iPhone mirroring and that is for a larger view of the same app actually running on your iPhone. 

So as you can see even if you're not into the new AI features of macOS Golden Gate there's a lot to look forward to once you update. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.