The macOS 27 public beta is worth it just for the Liquid Glass tweaks

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.

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.

While I’m far from the biggest Siri fan, I dig this feature. I immediately turned Siri’s talking speed to the maximum setting and expressivity to the lowest — making it as robotic and to-the-point sounding as it’ll go. I don’t think I’ll ever go back, and I can’t wait to make the change on all my Apple devices. Every voice assistant should have a setting like this. I’d even welcome a third slider for friendliness that lets me set it to DMV Clerk. Just give it to me straight and shut up as fast as possible.

Another nifty new feature I didn’t know I wanted is an overflow button in the Menu Bar. On macOS 26, if you had too many menu bar items, the leftmost ones could end up hidden beneath the left-hand app menus. Now, you can load the top Menu Bar with buttons and drop-downs, and Golden Gate keeps anything on the Menu Bar to the left of the notch hidden, with a double-arrow button temporarily expanding them.

As for all the new Photos app features, I think the best update is for Clean Up. It feels pretty reminiscent of Google’s Magic Eraser, and it did a good job removing a variety of subjects from photos I tested it in. I used it to remove a bit of greenery in the corner of a blue sky from one of my Sony RX10 V photos, but that’s easy and low stakes. What was more impressive was how it convincingly removed a fly from the center of a flower with lots of little details. It won’t replace Photoshop for people who need Photoshop, but it’s nice to have this feature for those who don’t.

The other big Photos features for both macOS and iOS are Reframe and Extend, allowing you to turn and tilt the composition of your picture and expand the framing beyond what you actually shot. My colleague Allison already tested this on the iPhone, but I took a turn trying it on the Mac — again with photos I shot on non-Apple devices.

Extend does a decent job of expanding your image with made-up content, but Reframe never looks quite right to my eyes. And both give Apple Intelligence way too much freedom to take liberties and slop things up a little: Reframing a picture of a plane in the sky turned it into a weird fake-looking AI mockup, and doing it to a photo of a bunny gave it odd proportions.

I don’t really use the Photos app on macOS since I’m a Lightroom Classic guy, but I wouldn’t touch these even if I did.

Another thing I still don’t find myself using much is Siri AI. My initial hands-on showed it’s more useful than it was (the bar was so low). But despite Siri’s big upgrade, I still struggle to find its usefulness. I don’t default to asking it questions or looking things up via Siri (either text-based or via voice searches). I still have a hard time trusting AI answers to even simple questions, and I don’t know if that worry will ever go away. Maybe when it stops being wrong so often.

There’s a new Ask Siri menu item that sometimes appears at the top of the right-click context menu in the OS and in some apps. It doesn’t always show up, which makes it more jarring when it does, even though the context menu shifts higher to accommodate it. I’m sure I’ll adjust eventually.

The same goes for the updated battery percentage number in the Menu Bar, which matches iOS with a small number within the battery icon. I complained about it in my initial Golden Gate hands-on, and I still don’t prefer it. But I’m already used to it.

Even though I don’t care much for Siri AI and the new Apple Intelligence features, I much prefer Golden Gate to Tahoe. Will it win over those who stuck with Sequoia to avoid Liquid Glass entirely? Maybe not. But some of the little improvements are nice, and if you’re already living the glassy life on your Mac, it’s nothing but an upgrade.