In addition to the bigger features that each deserved their own chapter, macOS 27 Golden Gate includes dozens of smaller changes, some of which are quite significant. These are the ones that apply to multiple apps or to the system as a whole. Single-app changes are covered separately.
Apple claims many other small improvements, but most are either so minor or described so superficially that there is nothing more to say about them. What follows is only what testing confirmed.
iCloud
Apple is no longer using the term “collaborate” for iCloud sharing in which the live document is shared, as opposed to a static copy. Instead, the command on the pop-up menu is now Share a Link. (Similarly, participants are no longer “Only invited people” but rather “People you choose.”) But the behavior is slightly different now.
If you right-click or Control-click a file or folder in iCloud Drive and choose Share, then choose Share a Link from the pop-up menu, you now see a couple of changes in the interface:
- If you click the text under that menu (“People you choose can view/edit”), the display expands as usual to show who can access the item and with what permissions. But there’s a new “Allow access requests” checkbox here. If you select that, then send a link to a group (as opposed to a single person), each recipient must explicitly request permission to access it, and you must approve that request. Only then is that person added to the Participants list.
- A new Copy Link command appears on the Share menu. If you choose that, a dialog appears, with two options: click Continue to share in the normal way (keeping in mind the extra step described above if you share it with a group), or click Allow Anyone with the Link to copy the shareable link to your clipboard with no constraints on who can use it.
International and multilingual features
Apple is continually expanding macOS’s capabilities to support more languages, keyboards, and regional features. Of course, as a U.S. company, Apple usually releases features in U.S. English first, then slowly spreads them to other languages (and other forms of English). The rate at which this happens is often frustratingly slow, but at least progress is occurring.
Since my knowledge of other languages is insufficient to test most of these features, I can’t tell you much about them, but here’s the list:
- Keyboards are now available for Afrikaans, Basque, Baybayin, Blackfoot, Comanche, Cree, English (Philippines), Galician, Guarani, Kiowa, Luxembourgish, Tsuu’tina, Xhosa, and Zulu.
- Typing suggestions are available for the Vietnamese VNI keyboard.
- Automatic punctuation occurs with most keyboards, regardless of language, with punctuation suggestions appearing as you type in Chinese.
- You can now set the interface language for macOS itself to English (Canada)—woo hoo!—and English (Philippines) in System Settings > General > Language & Region > Preferred Languages.
- Conversion from Pinyin to Simplified Chinese and Kana to, I’m presuming, kanji, has improved. (The way Apple worded this feature on a slide in the WWDC keynote read oddly to me.)
- Live Captions are available in FaceTime for Traditional Chinese.
- Call Recording transcriptions are now available for Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese, while Live Voicemail transcriptions are available for English (Singapore) and Japanese.
- When you use grammar checking (via Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Check Grammar with Spelling in supported apps), multilingual grammar checking is now supported.
- In Reminders, autocategorization is available for different (unspecified) languages.
- Apple’s feature list also included “Natural language time formats for Chinese and Hindi,” “Holiday-aware alarms in China,” “Chaizi typing,” “Alternate calendars for India support current time zone while traveling,” and “Smart language and keyboard configuration suggestions,” though I don’t know enough about any of these features to describe them further.
Ethernet indicator
When you connect an Ethernet cable to your Mac (which, for laptops, requires an adapter), the Wi-Fi icon on the menu bar changes to an Ethernet icon; clicking this displays information about your Ethernet connection.
Swipe down to refresh
In any app that already has a refresh or reload mechanism (such as Mail and Safari), you can swipe down with two fingers on a laptop’s built-in trackpad, a Magic Trackpad, or a Magic Mouse to refresh the page, just as you would (with one finger) on an iPhone or iPad.
Touch control in Sidecar
Sidecar is a feature that lets you use an iPad as a secondary display for a Mac—either mirroring your Mac’s screen or extending the desktop. That’s a cool trick, but if you wanted to not merely see what’s on your Mac’s display but also control it, Sidecar has always offered extremely limited capabilities. (For example, you could scroll with two fingers but you couldn’t tap individual icons or menu items for Mac apps.)
In macOS 27, Apple has extended Sidecar in such a way that, for the most part, your finger acts as a proxy for your mouse pointer. You can tap any icon or other control, scroll with one finger, use menus normally, and so on.
This feature requires that your iPad also be running iPadOS 27.
Mac news and rumor sites claim this feature isn’t so much about having more control from your iPad, but rather part of the groundwork for a hypothetical future touch-screen Mac, which would presumably allow a similar form of interaction.
