Apple’s macOS 26 Tahoe has new Liquid Glass look, customizable folders, and more

Spotlight is also getting a fairly major overhaul, with some specific search views for recent and contextually relevant files. It will be able to search through and launch iPhone apps using iPhone Mirroring, and there’s a new view that will show your system clipboard history.

A new Spotlight feature called Quick Keys allows you to quickly perform actions—like sending a message, adding a reminder, or executing a Shortcut—with small abbreviated instructions like “sm” for “send message” or “ar” for “add reminder.” Once you’ve used a Quick Keys shortcut, you can type your message or reminder directly in the Spotlight bar—Apple even demoed someone writing a full email in Spotlight.

The Shortcuts app gains a few new tricks, including the ability to trigger shortcuts automatically—for example, at a certain time of day, or when you plug in an external display or another accessory. Apple is adding some Apple Intelligence functionality for Shortcuts, too, allowing shortcuts to leverage various AI models, including Apple’s on-device language models, cloud-hosted models, or ChatGPT. You could use shortcuts to summarize text, for instance, or generate an image with Image Playgrounds.

Finally, macOS Tahoe introduces Metal 4, the next-generation version of Apple’s proprietary graphics API. The big new feature in Metal 4 is “frame interpolation,” a feature similar to Nvidia’s DLSS Frame Generation that will attempt to smooth frame rates by using AI to generate frames that it can insert between frames that the GPU actually renders.

Tahoe will also include many of the new additions included in iOS, like improvements to Messages like background images, and the new dedicated Games app. Apple will release an early beta of the OS to developers today and to the public later this summer. The update will be available to the general public sometime this fall.