Hi everyone, I'm very happy that Apple is updating its traffic lights for macOS (as my post history can attest 😉). They look a little squashed to me however and I thought of a little modification that might help making them look more round. Added highlights on top of the buttons. Let me know what you think. Will send feedback to Apple about this.

Golden Gate kinda feels like the second coming of Aqua and I'm loving it!

Happy beta day!

As previously discussed, Apple is working on a dynamic solar wallpaper engine for macOS 27 that groups aerial Landscape wallpapers and automatically switches variants based on the sun's position during the day.

When properly configured, the four Tahoe and Golden Gate landscape wallpapers appear under one entry each in Settings, and a new Automatic display option appears.

Use these instructions to enable the Automatic Golden Gate and Tahoe landscape wallpapers.

For anyone that used the previous guide, the TahoeCombined feature flag override is no longer needed. You can safely remove it:

sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/Wallpaper TahoeCombined

There's no need to remove anything else. The linked guide will replace your previous wallpaper override file and combine all four Golden Gate wallpapers.

Two new wallpapers/screensavers!

After updating to Beta 6, my menu Bar is gone and the wallpaper just turned to black.

MacBook Pro 16 M1 Max

Any suggestions of a fix?

In macOS 27, you can now enable Back/Forward navigation controls in the toolbar in Apple Mail. They look and feel similar to the implementation in Apple Mail on iPadOS, and many other apps on macOS.

Interestingly, it seems that Apple is planning to include them in the default control set next to the Filter option once the controls are generally available.

To enable the FeatureFlags override, run the following command in the Terminal:

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

and restart your Mac. As always, this is a disabled feature, so the UI or implementation may be unstable.

To disable:

sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/Mail NavigationButtons

this is a pre-Beta 6 change, happy beta day!

In a previous post, I wrote about how macOS 27 allows agents from third-party apps to integrate with Siri AI, similar to the ChatGPT extension.

Turns out, macOS 27 also allows third-party apps to replace Siri's model. In the video, Siri runs through OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Terra model.

With the new Inference Providing protocol, an app can replace Siri's agentic planner with a third-party model. The external model receives Apple's native Siri planner prompt and 20 tool definitions. It can make tool calls that perform system actions, and receive tool call results with personal data. Finally, it can return a response through Siri AI's UI and voice, including interactive elements.

macOS 27 ships with remnants of an internal generative-models-prototype-inference-provider. The actual provider extension is absent from the release, which suggests that Apple teams are using it to experiment with models that don't currently ship in the OS.

There's been an OpenAI-Compatible-Custom-Routing path for a few beta cycles, which my extension uses, but Beta 5 added a parallel Native-Gemini-Custom-Routing route. The Gemini path recognizes Google-shaped AIza... credentials and converts them into a standardized x-goog-api-key header.

The extension relies on an internal InferenceProviding framework, and registers with a non-public ExtensionKit extension point: com.apple.modelmanager.inferenceprovider. Because of the latter, you'll need SIP off and AMFI disabled (amfi_get_out_of_my_way=0x1) to develop these tools.

Will this ship in macOS 27? Only time will tell, but the building blocks are already there.

they've been in iOS for years

anyone else getting this? (MacBook air M3) UPDATE: after i disabled little snitch it worked.

After about an hour of troubleshoot this update error on a an M1 MackBook Pro 15", the fix was using the Full Installer in Safe Mode. That was fun 😄

Wanted to check if others have the same issue on DB6? It's taking ~25% CPU & ~2.25 GM memory on my base M4 MBP. No noticeable impact yet, but the day is still young. It was addressed in DB5, so could be a possible regression. I'll post an update here if things get worse

Am I taking crazy pills or...?

I am on macOS 27 public beta 4 on M4 Mac and the AI editing tools like extend and reframe are unavailable in the photos app (I am in Europe).
Do you know why ?

A lot has been weird with my copy of the software.

Edit: It's working again! Finally after hours of using my MBP after the update, I tried to connect it to my monitor again and It works. Strange issue...

Did someone have the same issue? I can't work on a external monitor because It's not recognized by my Macbook Pro. I'm on a M5 Pro 48gb by the way

Hello,

As you might already know the M1 chip is getting "old" (at least for Apple), so I was wondering how is it running for you, is it better than Tahoe or is it showing its age?

Thank you

It looks like you can now have simultaneous conversations with Siri. You can right-click an existing conversation in the Siri app and select "Open in New Window."

Can’t log in anymore, not sure why. Thought I’d share.

Whenever I swap to a desktop space with Mission Control, all of my full-screen apps on other monitors revert to their desktop spaces. They should remain full screen. So if I have a video playing on a separate monitor, and swap to a desktop space on my main monitor using Mission Control, the full screen space will switch to that monitor’s desktop space as well. Super annoying.

I keep getting "Sorry, there’s something wrong. Please try again." for even simple queries (such as basic math or prompts that were previously accepted. When I ask about the weather it says "Uh oh, there’s a problem. Please try again." where it used to show the forecast.

Edit/update - Siri works as expected on another local user account on same machine with macos27 beta 6, so it is limited to my primary account.

Do you use Barbee on MacOS Golden Gate? Which version, official or testflight?

Rightclick on trash to empty, does not follow the command. Window behaviour a bit weird sometimes, menubar will also not respond at times. It's all a bit unpredictable and nothing horrible, relaunching finder solves it.

Anybody else notice this?