Macos

Earlier today, I tried to activate Siri AI (Beta) on the Macbook Air M1 that I updated to Golden Gate a couple of weeks ago. For now, and who knows for how much longer, here in Europe there’s no hope of using Siri AI on the iPhone or iPad due to the ongoing disputes between Apple and European regulators. But on the Mac, there shouldn’t be any issues, provided you use English as the language for both your Mac and Siri.

The development of macOS has always followed a tick-tock pattern, more or less like Intel processors: the tick versions are more exciting and introduce new and spectacular features, while the tock versions are relaxed and focus on integrating these features into the operating system, fixing bugs and optimizing the overall behavior of the system to make it faster and more responsive.

I won’t make it long, just a few quick hot takes (or should I say lukewarm, since a day has already passed?) on what struck me most in the introductory keynote for WWDC26. Parental Controls. Maybe it is because my daughters are already grown up, but I’ve always had many reservations about the effectiveness of parental controls. Kids easily bypass them, perhaps with the help of a nerdy friend, while parents gain a false sense of security and, worse still, use them to deceive themselves into thinking they have no responsibility for their children’s online activities.

– Source: Julian Zwengel on Unsplash. One of the (few) reasons to switch to macOS 26 Tahoe is the opportunity to use the language model that powers Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence is the final product, natively integrated into the Apple ecosystem, with which we can process text (but also images) directly on our device. For example, by selecting a section of text and right-clicking with the mouse to choose Show Writing Tools, we have at our fingertips a useful tool for summarising those mile-long documents or for rewriting hastily jotted-down sentences.

It is not just a matter of disk icons. As soon as I saw what Tahoe had done to the icons of many applications installed on my Mac, I decided I had to do something to restore the original look of the icons. I tried several times, using Apple’s home‑automation tools, Automator and Shortcuts, but nothing worked and there was always some function missing. Or maybe I’m just not very good at using them.

After less than two months since the official release, Tahoe seems poised to become another one of those macOS versions to be forgotten, like Lion, Mavericks, Sierra, Catalina, or Ventura. Aside from Liquid Glass, which I’ll discuss in a moment, what does Tahoe have that’s memorable? There’s the telephone‑call filter, which actually belongs more to iOS than macOS and still has many limitations, and there are also improvements to Spotlight search. But is it really worth upgrading an operating system just for that?1

The Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) is a method for performing calculations without the need for parentheses. RPN was popularized in the ’70s and ’80s by Hewlett-Packard (HP), that used it in all its scientific and financial calculators. When using calculators from rival Texas-Instruments, which all relied on parentheses, it was easy to lose track of how many parentheses had been opened or closed, often forcing users to re-enter the entire expression from scratch. Those who used an RPN calculator didn’t have these problems, although they had to overcome a small initial learning curve to get used to the new notation.

A few days ago, right on schedule, Apple released to developers the third update of the macOS 26 Developer Beta, better known as Tahoe. Once the update is complete, it doesn’t take long to realize that Apple is (slowly) modifying something in the Liquid Glass graphical interface of the latest version of its operating system.1

– Image generated by Google Gemini. Take macOS Tahoe, updated to version 26.0 Developer Beta 2, and open the Terminal. Actually, don’t just open one Terminal; open two, three, four different Terminals, each in its own tab. More or less like this: Now tell me: which is the active Terminal?

It’s becoming a habit. Earlier this year, instead of waiting, like I usually do, for the next version of macOS to be ready (or nearly ready) before installing the current one, I installed Sequoia on all my Macs. A few days ago, I decided to take the plunge and install the very first developer beta of Tahoe on a Mac that I don’t use much, mainly to try out the new Liquid Glass interface on macOS.1