Apple’s OS 27 releases are out of the ordinary–in a good way

The last two years at WWDC, Apple has felt like it’s been in a hurry. In 2024, in a hurry to catch the AI wave before it entirely passed them by. (They didn’t catch that wave–they wiped out, lost their surfboard, and may have been partially gnawed on by a shark.) Then last year it felt like it was trying to cover up its embarrassment about AI failures by rushing out a new design scheme that felt ill conceived, especially when it came to the Mac.

This year feels different. Apple is unveiling a second take on its AI plans, but it feels like they’ve spent the intervening two years trying to make sure that this time, it sticks. And when it comes to almost every other announcement at WWDC, it feels like the company is taking stock, measuring twice, and cutting once. As famed basketball coach John Wooden warned his young charges, it’s important to be quick but not to hurry.

Snow Leopard memories

It’s been 17 years since OS X Snow Leopard (and yes, that’s a link to my review of it for this very site), but its memory looms large. It is famously one of Apple’s relatively rare OS releases that mostly avoided huge tentpole features in favor of a focus on speed, efficiency, and quality-of-life tweaks that make the experience of being a Mac user better.

It’s easy to understand why these sorts of releases are rare. Just look at the reaction to this week’s WWDC: I’ve seen several people refer to the keynote as “boring.” I wouldn’t go that far, but the presentation’s initial segment about platform updates was really hard to focus on… because it didn’t have a focus! It really couldn’t, unless you count the slide that contained a hundred little blurbs of text detailing individual changes or additions across all of Apple’s operating systems.

It’s hard to sell “we fixed lots of stuff.” It’s a lot easier to hype people about a handful of high-profile features. And so lots of tech companies tend to prioritize the shiny objects rather than “sweating the details,” as Apple’s Craig Federighi said right at the top of the WWDC keynote. This week at Apple Park, I heard more than one Apple person explicitly reference Snow Leopard, as well as iOS 12, as inspiration for the current set of OS releases.

Changes big and small

macOS Golden Gate feels like a real apology to Mac users. Say what you will about macOS Tahoe–for the record, I really loved the productivity features–there’s no denying that its implementation of Liquid Glass was half-baked at best. While Apple’s official position on Liquid Glass is, unsurprisingly, that it’s just in need of some tweaks based on user feedback, the story on the Mac is more dramatic. The Mac gets a rollback of several Liquid Glass missteps, including the disastrous sidebar design and the reintroduction of an actual toolbar.

And while you couldn’t hear it on the live stream, at Apple Park, there was loud applause from the audience when Apple announced that it was standardizing the corner radius on all Mac windows. Seems esoteric, right? But realize, every single one of those developers doesn’t just write software for Apple platforms, but uses the Mac to write that software. They are Mac users who are technical enough to recognize some of the biggest design messes of the 26-era OSes, and knew to applaud when those goofs were being addressed.

You can’t predict what will arrive for all users in the fall based on the first developer beta, but when I booted into macOS Golden Gate on a spare laptop this morning, I was taken back to the very earliest days of OS X. Yes, the sidebars in Finder feel like coming home, and toolbars are much clearer. But it’s the glass effect on buttons–they’re bright, with highlights and an outline–that really brought on the nostalgia trip. It’s starting to feel like Liquid Glass is intentionally riffing on Aqua, the original OS X design language. Nothing says Aqua like big glossy buttons, and while I made no attempts to lick the Golden Gate interface, I did get some serious early-2000s vibes.

But honestly, the new feature that gives me the biggest flashback to the olden days is actually one of the most cutting edge of all the features Apple announced this week. Apple has always, from the very beginning, been guided by the principle of bringing high technology to regular people to solve their problems. And from the days of HyperCard in the 1980s through the introduction of AppleScript in the 1990s and Shortcuts in the 2010s, Apple has attempted to find ways to put the power of programming and automation in non-programmers.

I experienced the closest Apple has ever come to fulfilling this dream last Monday, as I sat in front of an iPad typing normal English sentences into Shortcuts, pressing Return, and watching as Apple’s AI model fashioned those requests into entirely functional Shortcuts, complete with scheduling. Typing “give me a summary of my day’s events and to-do’s every day when I wake up” actually just… worked? “Go into Do Not Disturb when I connect to my shower speaker,” too. Even a more complex command like “ask me for text and add it to a text file with today’s date on it, saved on the Desktop, prepended with the time, and create the file if it’s not already there” generated an entirely functional Shortcut.

There are a lot of caveats. The model creating Shortcuts can get a little confused, it doesn’t always work (especially with more complex actions), and it doesn’t work with third-party apps. But leaving all that aside, it’s a new-school solution to an old-school problem, one Apple’s been trying to solve forever. For a supposedly quiet operating-system release cycle, it was a pretty revelatory experience. If these are the sorts of features we have to look forward to this summer and fall, it’s going to be a pretty great cycle–regardless of the lack of flash.