O Apple Creator Studio desbloqueia vários recursos bacanas de aplicativos já conhecidos pelos usuários de dispositivos da Maçã.
Dentre os exemplos, estão os apps Pages, Numbers e Keynote. Com eles, assinantes do Creator Studio podem gerar imagens e adicioná-las aos seus documentos, planilhas e apresentações de slides.
Com uma assinatura ativa do Apple Creator Studio, usuários do aplicativo Keynote podem usufruir de benefícios especiais.
Um deles, por exemplo, é o Gerar Apresentação (Generate a Presentation). Como o nome sugere, é possível usar um esboço de texto para criar uma apresentação completa, com títulos, tópicos e um tema consistente.
Como gerar uma apresentação no Keynote pelo iPhone/iPad
Na tela inicial, selecione “Gerar Apresentação”.
Escolha um tema para os slides.
Adicione as informações desejadas no campo “Visão geral” e, no campo “Pontos principais”, insira uma lista ou parágrafos com os detalhes que você quer que apareçam na apresentação.
Toque na setinha do canto superior direito para gerar a apresentação.
Como gerar uma apresentação no Keynote pelo Mac
Com o app aberto, clique em “Novo Documento” e, no canto inferior direito, em “Gerar”.
Adicione as informações e selecione “Gerar” para que os slides sejam gerados com base nos dados fornecidos.
Com uma assinatura do Apple Creator Studio, é possível aproveitar diversos recursos extras em aplicativos já conhecidos da empresa, como é o caso do Keynote.
No app dedicado à criação de slides, é possível fazer com que as notas de apresentação sejam geradas de forma automática em um slide — eliminando a necessidade de fazer isso manualmente.
Como gerar notas de apresentação no Keynote pelo iPhone/iPad
Com a apresentação aberta, toque nos três pontinhos (na parte superior), em “Opções de Visualização” e “Mostrar Notas da Apresentação”. Depois, selecione o slide desejado, vá novamente até os três pontinhos e em “Gerar Notas”.
Após fazer isso, é possível alterar o tamanho da fonte ou aplicar formatação de texto às notas do apresentador. Selecione-as, vá até o botão com um pincel (na parte superior) e use os controles de texto.
Como gerar notas de apresentação no Keynote pelo Mac
Com a apresentação sendo mostrada, clique no ícone ao lado do semáforo (no canto superior esquerdo) e escolha “Mostrar Notas da Apresentação”.
Selecione o slide desejado e clique no quarto botão (da esquerda para a direita) na parte superior.
Com uma assinatura do Apple Creator Studio, usuários do aplicativo Keynote podem usufruir de recursos especiais para criar e gerenciar as suas apresentações de slides.
Um deles é o chamado Correção de Slide (Slide Clean Up), que pode corrigir automaticamente o alinhamento dos objetos e outras inconsistências em um slide.
Se for um assinante, veja como utilizar isso na prática no seu iPhone, iPad e Mac! 😉
Com uma apresentação aberta no Keynote, toque em um espaço vazio no slide, na seta “>” e vá em “Correção de Slide”.
Ou navegue até o slide que deseja editar, toque nos três pontinhos (na barra de ferramentas) e vá em “Correção de Slide”.
Como corrigir um slide pelo Mac
Assim como no iPhone e iPad, você pode seguir um dos vários métodos diferentes para corrigir o slide desejado.
O primeiro deles é clicando com o botão direito do mouse em um espaço vazio e escolhendo “Correção de Slide”
Se preferir, navegue até o slide que deseja editar e clique no botão roxo na barra de ferramentas, escolha o slide que deseja editar no navegador de slides e clique em “Correção de Slide”.
Ou, no slide desejado, vá até Slide » Correção de Slide (no menu Slide, na parte superior da tela).
Segundo a Apple, o número exato de imagens, slides e notas do apresentador que podem ser gerados varia com base na complexidade das consultas e na disponibilidade do servidor e da rede.
No mínimo, por mês — se usado de forma exclusiva —, você pode:
Gerar 50 imagens;
Gerar 250 formas;
Gerar 50 apresentações com 8 a 10 slides cada;
Gerar notas do apresentador para 700 slides.
Esses limites são redefinidos mensalmente e podem ser conferidos a qualquer momento.
Como visualizar o status de uso
Pelo iPhone/iPad
Abra o Pages, Numbers, Keynote ou Freeform e toque no botão com três pontinhos. Depois, vá até “Recursos de Inteligência” e “Mostrar Status de Uso”.
Pelo Mac
Dependendo do app que estiver usando, selecione “Pages”, “Numbers”, “Keynote” ou “Freeform” na barra de menus. Depois, selecione “Recursos de Inteligência” e “Mostrar Status de Uso”.
Nosso aplicativo — disponível para iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch e Mac — acaba de receber uma atualização significativa para a versão 5.0.2, repleta de melhorias e correções pedidas por muitos de vocês. 😉
Atendendo a muitos pedidos, implementamos de volta o gesto de deslizar a partir do canto da tela para sair de um post e retornar à tela inicial do app.
Também corrigimos um comportamento que incomodava bastante: ao tocar em links externos dentro de um post e depois voltar para o app, agora você retorna exatamente para a mesma posição de leitura em que estava — sem perder o lugar.
Os favoritos também passaram por uma revisão importante e agora são devidamente sincronizados entre iPhone, iPad e Mac.
Melhorias na marcação de posts como lidos/não lidos, incluindo o retorno de uma seção “Posts” nos ajustes do app;
A possibilidade de adicionar tíquetes ao Carteira (Wallet) diretamente pelo app;
Aprimoramentos gerais em acessibilidade.
Agradecimentos
Fica aqui um agradecimento especial ao Cassio Rossi e ao Mozzer pelas colaborações feitas em nosso projeto no GitHub para esta versão.
A atualização já está disponível na App Store — e, como sempre, vale a pena atualizar o quanto antes para aproveitar todas as novidades. Em breve, é claro, voltamos com mais! 😉
Além de alterar a cor do fundo da janela do aplicativo Pixelmator Pro dos Macs, a Apple também permite realizar outra forma de personalização visual.
Trata-se da possibilidade de alterar a aparência do app — que pode ou não corresponder à aparência que você já usa no macOS em geral: escura, clara ou automática, esta última variando de acordo com a hora do dia.
Com o Pixelmator Pro e uma assinatura do Apple Creator Studio, o processo de edição de imagens fica muito mais fácil e eficaz, graças às ferramentas avançadas disponibilizadas.
Uma dessas ferramentas é a Super resolução (Super Resolution). Com ela, é possível ampliar qualquer foto, ao mesmo tempo que se tenta preservar a nitidez e os detalhes.
Com o aplicativo Pixelmator Pro, donos de Macs podem editar as suas fotos usando as inúmeras ferramentas avançadas disponibilizadas.
Para que esse processo de edição seja o melhor possível, o app possibilita que você escolha um dos diversos layouts de trabalho disponibilizados — como os otimizados para fotografias, design e ilustração, por exemplo.
Mais do que isso, você pode configurar um layout de espaço de trabalho personalizado e salvá-lo como uma predefinição.
Com o Pixelmator Pro aberto, vá até Pixelmator Pro » Ajustes…, na barra de menus, ou utilize o atalho ⌘ command,.
Vá até a aba “Espaço de trabalho” e escolha um dos layouts. Ou, se quiser criar um novo espaço, selecione o “+”, insira um nome para o espaço de trabalho e clique em “Renomear”.
Clique duas vezes na miniatura do novo espaço de trabalho, arraste os elementos delineados em azul para a nova posição e clique em “OK”.
Se você utiliza esse app para editar fotos, projetar e ilustrar, uma dica bem simples pode lhe interessar. Trata-se da possibilidade de alterar a cor do fundo da janela do Pixelmator Pro — podendo definir o quão clara ou escura ela será.
Com o app aberto no seu Mac, vá até Pixelmator Pro » Ajustes…, na barra de menus, ou use o atalho ⌘ command,.
Clique na aba “Geral” e use o menu suspenso ao lado de “Fundo da janela” a fim de escolher uma das opções: “Padrão”, “Branco”, “Cinza claro”, “Cinza”, “Cinza médio”, “Cinza escuro” ou “Preto”.
Abaixo, um exemplo de como fica na opção “Cinza claro”:
Pesquisadores da Group-IBapontaram a existência de um novo malware para macOS chamado ClickLock Stealer, que usa uma falsa verificação da Cloudflare para enganar os usuários, roubando dados sensíveis.
Mirando usuários na Itália, nos Estados Unidos, na Jordânia e no Reino Unido, os criminosos iniciam o ataque simulando uma verificação de CAPTCHA da Cloudflare e, na sequência, convencem a vítima a copiar e colar um comando no Terminal do Mac.
Após a execução, o malware é instalado enquanto exibe uma falsa tela de progresso. Se o usuário optar por tentar interromper a instalação ou não seguir de alguma forma com o processo, ele fecha todos os aplicativos visíveis, deixando apenas uma janela para inserir a senha do macOS. O ciclo de insistência do software pode passar dos 3 dias (algo em torno de 83 horas, segundo o estudo).
Depois de instalado, o malware começa a coletar senhas de navegadores, extensões de carteiras de criptomoedas, arquivos de carteiras digitais, dados de gerenciadores de senhas e outras informações comprometedoras.
Segundo os especialistas, o ClickLock Stealer começou a ser distribuído em maio passado, passando despercebido por todos os mecanismos de pesquisa até recentemente. Ele foi identificado em 33 países, em sua maioria europeus, sem veiculação a algum grupo de crime cibernético, distribuído muito possivelmente por uma campanha de engenharia social do tipo ClickFix.
O estudo recomenda aos usuários que nunca colem comandos de websites no Terminal, independentemente de como a página se parece ou do que ela alega fazer, e a nunca entregar a sua senha a espaços extraoficiais (como comandos) — caso você perceba que a execução de outros aplicativos está sendo encerrada. Se você desconfiar que a sua máquina foi infectada com o malware, revogue as sessões dos seus navegadores e altere todas as credenciais potencialmente comprometidas.
The public beta of macOS 27 Golden Gate is out today, and I’m sure many of you are wondering whether to take the plunge and give it a try in advance of its official fall release. That’s the question this preview is here to help answer. It’s not my final take on Golden Gate by any means; after all, I’ve only been using it for about a month, and there will be several more turns in the beta cycle between now and the public release. However, I’ve used Golden Gate long enough to help you make an informed decision about whether or not to install the public beta now.
Of course, it’s impossible for me to account for everyone’s unique Mac setups when considering Golden Gate’s stability, but it’s worth reiterating what I’ve said in past previews: modern Apple betas have been consistently stable. That’s to say, the risks of using the public beta are modest. It’s been years since I’ve had a critical app fail or lost data. I never go into beta season without a backup plan, though. If something goes terribly wrong, I have backups, backups of those backups, and alternate Macs I can switch to in the event of a disaster. I don’t expect to have to go to Plan B, but if you’re going to jump on the Beta Bus, you should have a Plan B, too.
Okay, you’ve been warned. Let’s get to the fun part.
Every year’s macOS update is a little different, but Golden Gate is more different than most. Instead of focusing on tentpole features and apps (with the exception of a new Siri app), macOS 27’s updates fall into three broad categories:
refinements to Apple’s Liquid Glass design language,
hundreds of system-level changes intended to improve your Mac’s performance, and
Apple Intelligence, which includes the new Siri app as well as many other AI additions to existing system apps.
It’s been a while since the “Snow Leopard Moment.”
With so many past macOS updates focusing on system apps, it’s refreshing to see Apple take a more holistic system-level approach, which harkens back to how most people remember OS X Snow Leopard. In fact, during WWDC briefings, Apple representatives likened the Golden Gate update to Snow Leopard before anyone in the room even asked about it.
Source: Apple.
Snow Leopard is remembered as a release that focused on performance over features. The reality is that the update also introduced its fair share of new features, but many were less splashy from a user-facing standpoint. They were under-the-hood updates that made the Mac work better without users having to think about it much. In that sense, Golden Gate has a lot in common with Snow Leopard. Other than the brand new Siri app, you probably won’t notice that much is different when you first launch the new version. But over time, the changes will reveal themselves, adding up to a whole that – with few exceptions – is greater than the parts.
So let’s take a closer look at how Liquid Glass has evolved, the most significant system changes, and what it’s like to use Siri and other Apple Intelligence updates in Golden Gate’s public beta.
Design
Windows stand out from each other more, and the sidebar runs edge to edge in Golden Gate.
Last year’s introduction of the Liquid Glass design language was divisive. I rather like it, and others don’t, but I expect the overwhelming majority of Mac users don’t have a strong opinion either way.
That said, I came away from macOS Tahoe feeling like its Liquid Glass implementation was unfinished, or at least unevenly applied, because it varied from app to app and even within apps. Examples included different transparency treatments within apps like Finder:
I use [Finder] with the tab bar visible most of the time, whether I’m using tabs or not. I also almost always use a list view in Finder. What I discovered when I turned off the tab bar and switched to an icon grid view was that the Finder toolbar and buttons became far more transparent. Dark file icons are more noticeable beneath the toolbar, and text becomes more of a distraction.
That sort of inconsistency has been fixed.
Finder in macOS Tahoe.
Finder in macOS Golden Gate. Even with Liquid Glass’ transparency turned on as far as it can go, toolbar buttons are more visible now.
Another big inconsistency was how toolbars were handled from app to app. In some apps, like Photos, they were very transparent, making buttons difficult to see against picture thumbnails in some cases. Other apps, like Reminders, used a more frosted treatment that prevented text and icons under toolbars from competing with the toolbar’s icons and text as a user scrolled their task lists. That, too, has changed for the better.
But perhaps the single biggest change to Liquid Glass is a new slider in the Appearance section of System Settings that lets you dial in the intensity of the transparency. By default, the slider is set directly in the middle. Moving the slider to the left makes buttons and other elements more transparent, while moving it to the right reduces transparency in favor of a frosted look.
Behold, the transparency slider.
The slider is a welcome change that lets users decide how transparent UI elements are. It’s the right choice when some people love Liquid Glass, some can’t stand it, and most don’t care. The default setting works well for those who don’t care and will never think to look for the transparency slider, while those who do care can dial in the look they prefer. Me? I’m a full transparency guy, at least for now, so you’ll see a lot of that here and in my fall review.
Window sidebars have been changed in a big way, too. In Tahoe, they resembled a glass sheet sitting on top of the window. I liked the look, but if you had overlapping windows, it was sometimes possible to mistake a sidebar for a separate window, which could be confusing. With Golden Gate, sidebars extend to the edges of their windows so they look as though they’re built into the windows instead of sitting on top of them.
Apple also reversed course on another controversial Tahoe change: icons next to menu items. I use keyboard shortcuts so much that I barely noticed the icons next to every single menu item. Now, however, they’re once again used sparingly.
The evolution of the Dictionary icon.
Mac app icons have been tweaked as well. Tahoe saw icons confined to the borders of a squircle, which is still a hotly debated topic. That hasn’t changed in Golden Gate. Instead, the glass effect that subtly distorted icon images has been dialed back, resulting in crisper looking icons.
There are other design changes, like deeper shadows to help distinguish windows from each other and more uniformly shaped window corners, that I’ll cover in the fall, but my early impressions of the changes have been positive. Everything feels more considered and consistent. Rather than feeling unfinished as it did in Tahoe, Liquid Glass now feels properly embedded into the fabric of the Mac.
System Changes
Nowhere is the Snow Leopard of it all more apparent than in the hundreds of little changes made to improve the day-to-day use of your Mac. I’m not going to catalog them all here, but I’ve used Golden Gate on two different Macs at this point, and based on my experiences so far, the changes are meaningful.
I installed Golden Gate on a MacBook Pro that I have on loan from Apple as soon as I got back from WWDC in early June. That laptop has an M4 Max chip and 128GB of memory, so it was already fast. But even on that Mac, I noticed differences when I installed Golden Gate.
Spotlight is very fast, even on my M1 Max Mac Studio used for this animation.
Most apps launch faster, with fewer Dock bounces, which I appreciate, but the most noticeable performance improvement has been to Spotlight. I liked what Apple did with Spotlight in Tahoe a lot, but its responsiveness has been inconsistent. As a result, I switched back to Raycast not long before WWDC for launching apps, running shortcuts, and initiating other actions.
When I installed Golden Gate, I switched back to using Spotlight and was blown away by the difference. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the speed-up sticks long-term, but the early results have been impressive. Finding apps, files, folders, shortcuts, and clipboard items is lightning fast. Searching in Photos and Mail, which each got their own search tune-up, is very fast, too.
Search in Mail has been improved, too.
Plus, even though the MacBook Pro I’ve been using to test Golden Gate is already fast, it’s worth noting that I have roughly 3TB of data stored on it. That includes tens of thousands of photos, email messages, and texts, so even given the laptop’s speed, Spotlight’s performance is still impressive.
What’s been most impressive, though, is the difference Golden Gate has made to my M1 Max Mac Studio. It has a similar number of files and half the memory. Just before updating it to Golden Gate about a week ago, I was feeling the pain of Spotlight slowdowns. I was running macOS 26.5, and searching for an app in Spotlight often pulled up the iPhone version before the one installed on my Mac. Perhaps that’s related to the fact that my iPhone is running the iOS 27 beta, but even Mac-only apps would sometimes take five or six seconds to show up at the top of the list in Spotlight when I searched for them.
That’s completely changed with Golden Gate. I’ve used macOS 27 on my Mac Studio for a shorter period than the MacBook Pro, but the difference in speed has been a real eye-opener, making Spotlight searches nearly instant. It’s also worth noting that the initial indexing of my 3TB of data only took about a half of a work day to complete on the Mac Studio, which was faster than I expected, having watched my iPhone 17 Pro Max take days to index.
Sending a 47MB EPUB file from one Mac running Golden Gate to another.
Also worth noting is that AirDrop is much, much faster now, too. I move images and other files between my iPhone, iPad, and Macs with AirDrop dozens of times each week. It’s a deeply embedded part of my workflow. Before installing Golden Gate, I rarely sent multiple items via AirDrop simultaneously because it could be very slow or even fail completely. Now, however, I’m retraining myself to send multiple screenshots and other files all at once because AirDrop is so much faster than before.
Launching apps and sending screenshots more quickly aren’t sexy new features that come with fancy screenshots I can share with you, but these are meaningful changes just the same. It remains to be seen how the improvements will hold up over time, but they’ve made a great first impression, so I’m optimistic. Changes that reduce friction are the kind of updates that help keep me focused on what I’m doing and get more done, which I consider a big win.
Those are the big-ticket system changes to the Mac, but of course, there are many other system-level changes coming, like better window positioning consistency when you use multiple displays, HDR UI elements and faster refresh rates for displays that support those features, resizable windows in the iPhone Mirroring app, full-resolution images in Shared Albums in Photos, and enhancements to Notes, Maps, Podcasts, and Messages. I’ll have more details on all of them in my fall review.
Apple Intelligence and the Siri App
The new Siri app.
The headline Apple Intelligence feature this year is the new Siri app, a dedicated chatbot-style interface that benefits from Apple’s AI collaboration with Google. Before I get into Siri, though, it’s worth noting that there’s more to Apple’s AI story this year than just the digital assistant. In fact, Apple Intelligence features have been sprinkled throughout the system:
Finder uses AI to suggest file and folder names based on their content;
Safari tabs can be automatically organized by topic;
Weak passwords can be automatically updated in the Passwords app;
Messages spawns little buttons that let you pull information out of a chat and into apps like Reminders and Calendar;
Natural language descriptions can be used to create Calendar events; and
Photos includes new AI-driven features like Spatial Reframing, Extend for expanding the borders of a photo, and improvements to the Clean Up tool.
Building shortcuts with natural language.
Shortcuts has joined the fray, too, with the ability to build shortcuts simply by describing them. This is the sort of democratization of automation that I love. Building shortcuts has always been simpler than writing code, but it’s also had a steeper learning curve than most people were willing to deal with. You won’t be able to build a complex shortcut with natural language alone, but the reality is that even people who know how to make complex shortcuts use a lot of simple ones for day-to-day tasks, and for that, the new feature is fantastic.
I’m also a fan of the ability to build Safari extensions by describing them. I’ve made a couple, like one that generates a Markdown-formatted link list from selected tabs, and the process of building it was fast and effective.
I’ll have more to say about all of these features in the fall, but they’ve made good first impressions. In past macOS updates, some of the Apple Intelligence features have felt a little out of place and bolted on. I appreciate that these new features are woven more cleanly into their underlying apps. Maybe the era of self-consciously calling every feature AI is coming to an end and they’ll just be called features again. We’re probably not quite there yet, but one can hope.
Using Siri AI from inside Spotlight.
As for Siri AI, which is surfaced in the new Siri app, Spotlight, context menus, and other locations, it’s worth keeping in mind that Apple has said it will launch later this year as a beta. The Siri AI features are also gated behind a waiting list, so don’t install the beta expecting to be able to use them right away, and even if you do get it, Siri AI is a beta of a beta.
As a result, Siri AI has more rough edges than other parts of Golden Gate. For example, it’s not uncommon for Siri requests to simply fail on one Mac but be correctly answered on another.
Other parts of Siri AI don’t work at all, like third-party app integrations since developers have to update their apps first. I can add tasks in Reminders, events in Calendar, and notes in Notes, but I haven’t had the chance to try a third-party Mac app that works with Siri AI yet. If you’re a developer working on Siri AI support, get in touch. I’ll be highlighting the best ones I try in the fall.
Siri is excellent for finding old texts in Messages, adding tasks to Reminders, and more.
Despite the current limitations, if you use chatbots as a replacement for Google Search, you’ll probably have a good experience with the new Siri app. That’s because even in these early betas, if you ask Siri something like, “Give me a day trip itinerary for a trip to Chicago this Saturday,” you’re likely to get good but pretty middle-of-the-road recommendations. From there, though, you can drill down with follow-up queries to get something more in line with your tastes. The results include source links you can follow, too. Given the ad-strewn mess that web search has become, using Siri for this sort of thing is a meaningfully better experience.
The one caveat on Siri’s world knowledge is that it’s roughly 2-3 weeks stale in some places. Ask Siri to give you the most recent article on any website, and it will be 2-3 weeks old. However, fetching current information instead of specific posts is more timely. When I asked whether Anthropic had made any announcements recently about Cowork, Siri correctly linked me to stories from two days prior.
Current events and sports show up quickly in Siri, but that’s not true for all web-based queries.
Likewise, facts like sports scores and celebrity deaths seem to get updated more quickly. I’m writing this on July 9, and I saw a headline in Apple News this morning that singer Bonnie Tyler passed away yesterday. I asked Siri if she was still alive and was told that she was “as of June.” I asked again a couple of hours later, and Siri answered that her death was announced on July 9 – the same day I asked.
Siri is also good at completing one or more actions as long as they fit within the defined set of App Intents schemas. “Remind me to walk the dog at 5:00 pm, add dinner with Jennifer at Mandalino’s to my calendar for Friday at 7:00 pm, and create a note that says ‘Hello World’” works reliably. In my early testing, Siri is also good at generating images comparable to what you’d get directly from Image Playground, creating and summarizing text, playing media like a requested podcast episode, and maintaining continuity when follow-up questions are asked.
Sometimes, Siri just takes a random stab at an answer.
Personal context generally works well, too. Siri can find old iMessages I’ve sent to people, it knows who my wife is and where I live, and it can find all sorts of information buried in Notes and other apps where Apple has done the work to expose that information. But like all AI systems, it sometimes makes things up. I asked Siri how old Federico is, and it looked at his entry in Contacts, which includes his birthday. The trouble is, I only included the month and day of Federico’s birthday, not the year, so Siri “guessed” that he’s 116 years old, which is off by a little. Siri also equates Reminders tasks that are assigned a time with Calendar events, which is odd.
When you dig deeper into Siri AI, you’ll discover that not all structured data on your Mac has been given the necessary makeover to work with it. A good example is Music. You can prompt Siri to play a song, but most of the rich metadata in the app isn’t exposed to Siri, which is a shame because it is exposed elsewhere, for example to AppleScript. Again, though, this is a beta, and there’s clearly more work to be done to take better advantage of what’s on your Mac.
Apps like Music don’t expose as much of their data to Siri AI as they do to AppleScript, which is frustrating.
Despite the limitations and rough edges, I expect that the new Siri app will be a hit. I’ve found Siri’s world knowledge answers to be a little superficial – similar to what Google’s AI Overviews produce. However, in-depth research isn’t the point, nor is it what people want or need most of the time. For information about current events, businesses, and other everyday questions, Siri is fine. Throw in the ability to manage tasks, calendar events, notes, and the other things people commonly do on their Macs and other devices, and it adds up to a greatly improved Siri experience.
Overall, Golden Gate is shaping up to be an excellent release. As for whether you should give it a try, I think it’s worth it, especially if you have an older Apple silicon Mac that would benefit from the performance gains. I also think many people will get a lot out of most of the Apple Intelligence features right away. Plus, if you primarily use an app like ChatGPT or Claude to search for information and like the idea of occasionally dropping information into apps like Calendar and Reminders, you’ll get a lot out of Siri, too.
And of course, even if you want more out of Siri than it offers today, patience is in order. I set my expectations for Siri low after Tahoe, and while I would have preferred more from this beta release, I’m willing to wait it out a little. I’m optimistic that it will improve because if Apple is able to assemble a tool that can perform multiple actions across its own apps and those from third parties, users will have an elegant, simple, privacy-focused solution that will go a long way towards fulfilling what was demoed at WWDC in 2024. And that’s something worth waiting for.
In the current era of coding agents becoming productivity assistants, iPadOS’ limitations are no longer defined by the lack of desktop-class multitasking or access to external peripherals. A new class of iPadOS shortcomings looms large on the horizon: the iPad’s app sandboxing and the absence of an open filesystem have relegated it to acting as a remote control for agents.
I’ve been ruminating on this thought for some time. I, of course, am very satisfied with the improvements Apple brought to the iPadOS platform throughout the 26 cycle: between new windowing, local capture, a menu bar, and the improved Files app, I can get most of my old-school work done on the iPad Pro without begrudging the experience like I used to a few years ago. What I’ve noticed this year, however, is that iPadOS 26 was an update designed to address the pre-existing low-hanging fruit of quasi-desktop efficiency; by design – and we have Craig Federighi on the record saying as much – it wasn’t intended to reinvent the wheel in any meaningful way.
That would have been fine a few years ago. The problem is that the productivity wheel is literally being reinvented by other companies as we speak. And in an unsurprising turn of events, the Mac is at the forefront of that reinvention, while the iPad is being left behind once again.
I’m writing this as someone who likes to be on the bleeding edge of AI tools. Since the release of Claude Code in early 2025, I (and, realistically, millions of other nerds whose taste aligns with mine) have increasingly moved a lot of my research, automation, coding, and other tasks considered “productivity” to desktop agents. These are powered by the same underlying technology as chatbots, but they’re considerably more powerful: Claude Code and Cowork, Codex, Perplexity’s Personal Computer, and self-hosted agents like OpenClaw and Hermes can understand intent and perform long-running tasks on your computer. They can write code, stay on a task for hours (or even days) at a time, analyze the contents of your screen, and even use a computer on their own. To believe that these AI tools are still a fad and chatbots are useless is misinformation at this point.
As of June 2026, I spend most of my days with two apps constantly open on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro: Codex and Notion. I’m a huge fan of what OpenAI has accomplished with Codex for Mac; their all-in-one package that combines thread-based chats with skills, plugins, connectors, computer use, memories, and system-wide filesystem access has genuinely allowed me to produce content for my audience that I wouldn’t have even dreamed of years ago. Since I started working with Codex, I’ve released a major update to Apple Frames, twoCLIs (with two more coming soon), Shortcuts Playground, and a brand new MacStories Shortcuts Archive. These are actual products that are used by thousands of people and are generating real revenue for MacStories. I’ve also created an entire suite of MacStories-only internal apps (now used by our whole team) and am currently in the process of researching my iOS 27 review, creating an app for Shortcuts Playground, and brainstorming a different product altogether for MCP.
I’m doing all of this on a Mac because the true Codex experience isn’t even “desktop-only”: it’s Mac-only.
Let me give you some examples. To make the original version of Shortcuts Playground, I had Codex with Computer Use scrape my entire library on the old MacStories Shortcuts Archive, download over 300 shortcuts, and learn my coding style. Once I had a plugin, I also had Codex create over 1,000 shortcuts on its own, install them in the Shortcuts app for Mac, and debug them visually to find issues. For the new Shortcuts Playground plugin and app, I’m going even further: Codex created over 3,500 shortcuts spanning the entire library of Shortcuts actions while simultaneously coordinating with other Codex threads – some of which are running on my Mac Studio – to build an app, train a local model for Core AI, and constantly iterate on the new harness behind the app. Meanwhile, I’m also spending time in Codex organizing sources for my iOS 27 review, managing my tasks with Reminders and my own RemCTL, and performing general research on any topic I think of. The net result of all this is that I’m shipping more things, making more money for MacStories, saving money thanks to our new internal tools, and – most importantly – learning a lot and having fun.
Working with Codex for Mac.
Some of the CLIs I’ve built. Two of them are coming soon.
In all of this, the iPad’s role is to be, once again, an accessory to the Mac – and a rather expensive one at that. I wrote last year about iPadOS’ third-party app problem, and I still think all of it applies today. What’s different in 2026 is that these powerful agentic tools that are redefining coding and knowledge work, and which are centralizing productivity inside so-called “super apps”, aren’t coming to the iPad, but not for political or financial reasons: they’re Mac-only because only macOS is mature and open enough to support them.
In a funny twist of fate, Apple spent years trying to make iPadOS catch up to macOS on the surface, only for macOS’ underlying nature to unlock a new generation of apps that are rewriting the rules of modern software. No amount of windowing and menu bars can change the fact that neither Claude Cowork nor Codex will ever be possible on the current version of iPadOS. From an open filesystem that lets agents poke around anywhere to powerful Accessibility and Screen Recording APIs for developers to features like system-wide hotkeys, dictation, and true background processes, Apple’s oldest operating system is the one that feels the freshest (and the most powerful) in the AI industry today.
In fact, the Mac is so powerful and well-equipped for this new wave of desktop agents, it even yields an amazing experience when used in a “headless” setup with no display attached to it. This may have started as a trend because of OpenClaw, but six months later, I believe that a Mac mini with Codex running on it is the best bang for your buck if you’re building an always-on agentic setup based on a frontier model that can do just about anything you throw at it.
Which brings me to the iPad’s only silver lining in this space right now.
Most of my Codex tasks are running on my Mac Studio server, but I also use Codex on my MacBook Pro. Thanks to Codex’s support for remote connections, I can chat with threads running on the Mac Studio from the Codex app on a different machine, which is a fantastic feature. Alternatively, I can use Apple’s excellent (and, again, Mac-only) Screen Sharing app to log into my headless Mac and interact with macOS with superior performance and image quality to VNC. (I also use this HDMI 2.1 dummy plug to unlock 4K resolution when headless.) Coordinating Codex threads across different projects and machines feels like the sort of thing that shouldn’t be possible, yet here we are.
If the iPad is still relevant to me in this specific new way of working, it’s entirely because of the ChatGPT app and the fact that OpenAI cared enough to design a good remote experience for iPhone and iPad users. The Codex section inside ChatGPT is a solid product and getting better every week; it’s also the only app of this kind that lets you connect to multiple computers at once and manage threads across all of them. With Codex remote on iPad, I can continue my projects from the MacBook Pro or Mac Studio, pin specific threads, and keep an eye on all my agents working in the background. In general, it’s also a way to bridge functionalities that are missing from iPadOS. Without Codex remote, I wouldn’t be able to ask my agent to reschedule my reminders and turn some emails into tasks in the same workflow; I wouldn’t be able to tell my agent to go to the Apple Newsroom, find me a specific press release, extract all images from it, and upload them to our CDN.
Codex remote on iPad.
Perhaps Siri AI will unlock similar capabilities (although I doubt to the degree of a frontier desktop agent), but it’ll still be limited to apps made by companies that decide to support App Intents. When I’m not using my Mac and I think of something I can’t do on the iPad these days, I instantly reach for Codex inside ChatGPT. I suspect this trend will only grow as more AI companies release similar remote experiences for iOS and iPadOS.
Here’s the issue, though: these are remote companion experiences. It’s great that they exist and that OpenAI cared enough to make them great, but they’re still no substitutes for the real Codex experience on a Mac. It’s ironic if you think about it, isn’t it? A headless Mac is still more flexible and powerful than an iPad hamstrung by the closed nature of its own OS and software gatekeeping.
My headless Mac Studio in Mirage for iPad.
Mirage for iPad’s app launcher.
If you’re among the five million people using Codex on a weekly basis and will be planning your next laptop purchase in a few months, perhaps these considerations will change the calculus for you. Especially in the face of price increases and RAM uncertainty, would you be better served by spending $1,499 on a hybrid laptop that gets work done the old way with 256 GB of storage, or $1,499 on a computer where AI is a first-class citizen with 24 GB of RAM and double the storage? If we accept that power users’ priorities and workflows will be dramatically changing in the near future (if they haven’t already!), all prices being equal, which OS is best positioned for the future?
Of course, I like using both an iPad Pro and a Mac for different tasks. But let’s face it; in this day and age – and especially after last week – not everybody has the budget for two computers that have some overlap between them. Sure, I could argue that an iPad Pro + a headless Mac mini is an insane combo to get the best of both worlds these days: the nimble and delightful nature of iPadOS and the freedom to experiment with AI on a Mac. You can install apps like the latest Jump Desktop beta or the great new screen sharing app Mirage on the iPad and use your Mac mini almost as if it were connected to the iPad’s display. Set up Tailscale on your network, and the Mac’s power can be with you at all times. But that’s a lot of money, and a lot of setup, to achieve an approximation of what a single MacBook Air can handle with more memory, more storage, and a couple of Mac apps.
I’m sure that Apple is aware of the changing nature of this landscape, but in a similar vein to chatbots and Siri, perhaps they were unprepared for the tide of agents to accelerate so quickly. If the idea of putting macOS on an iPad Pro continues to be a non-starter at Apple, and assuming agent-based coding and knowledge work are here to stay, what should the company do to make sure the iPad doesn’t get left behind again? Is a sandboxed Terminal for iPad backed by a dedicated “Agent Framework” the solution? Is working with other companies to build more “remote companion” apps the way forward?
Or, perhaps more obviously: how long until Siri AI can also become a capable agent, connected to App Intents, on par with competing frontier agents?
Until, and if, that happens, the iPad will once again play the role of sidekick to macOS.
When it comes to the bleeding edge of AI and pushing the frontier of agents forward, there’s nothing like the Mac.
Today, the team behind note-taking app Bear announced the public beta of Lettera, a new Mac text editor, based on Panda, an earlier beta that was used to work out the Bear 2.0 text editing engine. That immediately caught my eye because I’ve been using Panda for months. In fact, it’s the default way I open Markdown files now.
What drew me to Panda was the automation work I’ve been doing with agents. I use the Superpowers plugin (which got an excellent 6.0 update this week) with both Codex and Claude Code, which generates plans, design documents, and specs as part of its process. Panda turned out to be a great way to read those documents because the Bear 2.0 UI is excellent, and with Panda, I could open any Markdown file as a standalone document that didn’t require importing it into Bear itself.
According to the Bear team’s post today, Lettera is designed to preserve Panda’s simple approach to Markdown files and extend it to the Mac’s file system:
Lettera works around your setup. Open a single file to read and edit it, or open a folder as your writing workspace…
That way, Lettera can be used as your default Markdown editor no matter where Markdown files are saved, which is how I’ve been using Panda, or as a text editor with a dedicated folder of working files in iCloud, which is a departure from Bear, which hides the file system from users. Other features will be familiar to anyone who has used Bear before, including its excellent Markdown rendering, versioning, a table of contents sidebar, and support for multiple export formats.
I’ve only just scratched the surface of Lettera, but I was already a fan of the more limited Panda, so I expect Lettera to quickly become the text editor I use for any writing that isn’t an article like this one, for which I’m still using Obsidian, thanks to its extensive plugin catalog.
Security researcher Group-IB has discovered new Mac malware that it has dubbed ClickLock Stealer. As part of the installation of ClickLock Stealer, the installer will essentially lock your Mac until a login password is entered in a persistent window. Once a password is entered, the malware is installed and covertly captures data: browser credentials, crypto wallet extensions, desktop wallet files, password manager data, and more.
Users are targeted by threat agents using a fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA that persuades users to copy and paste a command in the Terminal of macOS. Once the installation is triggered, malware components are installed on the Mac while a fake Cloudflare progress window is displayed.
However, if a user trying to cancel the installation in progress, the malware then kills “every visible application every 210 milliseconds, leaving only a password dialog on screen until the user is forced to comply,” according to Group-IB.
The report also states that the highest number of users targeted are located in Italy, the U.S., Jordan, and the U.K. “The geographic distribution is consistent with a financially-motivated campaign targeting users in high-income regions where cryptocurrency adoption and macOS market share are both elevated,” said Group-IB.
How to protect yourself from malware
The easiest way to protect yourself from malware is to avoid downloading software from unfamiliar download sites. Never open links in emails or texts you receive from unknown and unexpected sources. If you get a message that looks like it is from an entity that you do business with, check the sender’s email address and inspect the URL carefully. If you see a link or button, you can Control-click it, select Copy Link Address, and then paste it into a text editor to see the actual URL to check it there.
Apple has vetted software in the Mac App Store, and it is the safest way to get apps. If you prefer not to patronize the Mac App Store, then buy software directly from the developer and their website. If you insist on using cracked software, you will always risk malware exposure.
Ever since I installed macOS Tahoe on my M3 Max MacBook, it hasn’t been right. I’m not talking about Liquid Glass or window corner radii, or even the Apps Panel. For the better part of a year, my MacBook simply hasn’t worked the way I expect it to.
Some days are better than others, but at any moment, my Mac will freeze, with my trackpad becoming unresponsive and a spinning beach ball replacing my cursor. It only lasts a few seconds, but on the worst days, it happens dozens of times an hour and renders the trackpad completely unresponsive, as if my MacBook were shut down. Each occurrence lasts no more than a few seconds, but it’s enough of an annoyance to severely cut down on my productivity.
As I’ve written before, I knew what the problem was from the beginning. Activity Monitor showed a consistent CPU spike in the “core spotlight” task, followed by an immediate spike in the accompanying kernel. A restart temporarily helped, but the problem cropped up again before too long.
At first I thought it was related to indexing, but it lasted far too long. Then I waited for updates—26.1, 26.2, and so on—but none fixed the problem for more than a couple of days. As I wrote in my last article about the issue, turning off some of the toggles in the Spotlight settings helped for a while, but after a month or so, the problems crept back in. And since there’s no way to disable Spotlight completely without some scary Terminal tinkering, I was stuck with a Mac that didn’t work right.
Throw it all away
For whatever reason, the issue has gotten progressively worse over the past couple of months. It appears to be related to the installation of macOS 26.5, but it could also be related to the Apple Creator Studio version of Pages, which exhibited its own issues.
How it works is that Apple builds an occasional Spotlight index, which is what it uses to access files as you search for them. The Pages issue seems to stem from its use of iCloud as a storage drive. (I’m not alone in suspecting this either; one of my Macworld colleagues experienced a similar issue with Spotlight and Pages.)
My problems got so bad that the Spotlight settings wouldn’t even load.
Foundry
Since there’s no way to fully turn off Spotlight as you can with Siri or Apple Intelligence, I tried a few things. First, I turned off the Pages toggle in the Spotlight settings. That didn’t work. Then I tried adding the Pages app and its Document folder to the Search Privacy option in Spotlight settings. No dice.
In a fit of exhaustion, I even added my entire MacBook drive to Search Privacy to prevent anything from being searched and again forced Spotlight to rebuild its index. That didn’t work either. Neither did macOS 25.5.1 or 25.5.2.
So I was stuck. My plan was to wait until macOS 26.6 arrived and see if that helped (though after five previous updates, I had little hope that it would), and perhaps give the macOS 27 public beta a shot. Otherwise, I would just deal with the freezes and hope they didn’t get any worse.
Unfortunately, they did. It got to the point one day where whenever I clicked on a new window, my MacBook would stall for a second or two before it let me do anything. I was ready to erase the whole thing and start over—but first I decided to root around my Library folder.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing this before. Basically, every app and feature has associated files that can be accessed if you find the right folder. I couldn’t find anything obvious, but a quick Google search told me where they were hiding: ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight. To find it, click on your desktop, then the Go menu at the top, then scroll down to Go to Folder, paste that whole string, and press Return.
Foundry
You’ll see a bunch of files and folders. Mine was filled with nearly 10,000 files and over 2GB of data. I had no idea where the problem lay or where to begin, and didn’t really care about breaking Spotlight, so I moved the whole folder into the Trash and selected Delete Immediately.
Two weeks later, there hasn’t been a single freeze, pause, or stutter on my MacBook. I’ve even flipped all of the Spotlight toggles back to green, and I still haven’t experienced any issues. For the first time since I installed Tahoe, I can finally use it without fear of freezing—just in time to install macOS 27. Here’s hoping Golden Gate goes a lot smoother.
Apple used to include perfect images for dynamic wallpapers and screensavers to showcase the namesake of its Mac operating systems: a dune in the Mojave Desert (Mac OS X El Capitan); a bird’s-eye view of Catalina Island (macOS Catalina); the Big Sur coastline (macOS Big Sur). Since macOS Monterey, abstract graphics had taken the spotlight; it was not until macOS 26 Tahoe that the default wallpaper returned to nature and landscape shots.
In the first two betas of macOS 27 Golden Gate, the abstract background with its brown-and-gold color scheme dominated. But with the third developer beta and the just-released Public Beta, the Mac now greets its users with a view of the sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge. In the screensaver, the camera slowly zooms across the rocks at the southern end of the bridge towards the surf.
There is also a second background with a screensaver, though this still needs to be downloaded: the Golden Gate Bridge at night. Here, the view from the northern side has been chosen, with the brightly lit city shimmering in the background. In the animated screensaver, you can see cars travelling across the bridge and the full moon slowly moving across the sky.
The Golden Gate Bridge wallpapers and screen savers are in macOS 27 System Settings > Wallpaper; look for them in the Landscape section.
An AppleCare Plus subscription for a Mac or iPad will cost more soon, with prices going up by $0.50 per month or $5 per year for new sign-ups while remaining the same for existing subscribers, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Gurman says that under the new AppleCare Plus pricing, "a plan for a new 13-inch MacBook Air increased to $7.99 from $7.49, or to $79.99 from $74.99 annually," following a move last year that similarly raised the plan's price on iPhones. We haven't seen the new pricing reflected on Apple's site in the US or terms of service yet, and Apple has not yet responded to a request for comment.
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