Apple Unveils macOS Tahoe with Liquid Glass Design, New Continuity Features, and Much More
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Today, Apple unveiled MacOS Tahoe 26 during its 2025 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote. Tahoe brings a massive visual redesign featuring a translucent new Liquid Glass motif. The new version, which will be released to the public this fall, also boasts expanded Apple Intelligence features, live translation, a Phone app, and much more.
Liquid Glass Interface
macOS Tahoe sports a beautiful new design that brings an enhanced experience to macOS while remaining familiar to users. The interface is crafter using Liquid Glass, which uses a new material that both reflects and refracts its surroundings. Apple has refined the Dock, sidebars, and toolbars. The menu bar is now completely transparent, which Apple says makes the display feel larger.
The new design brings more personalization options to the Mac, with icons available in both light and dark appearances, colorful new light and dark tints, and even a beautiful clear look. Users can customize folders by setting their colors and adding an emoji or symbol to the folder, making them easier to spot. The Mac Desktop also offers theme colors and personalized wallpapers.
New Continuity Features, Including a Phone App and Live Activities
macOS Tahoe also brings new Continuity features, including a new Phone app that allows users to relay calls from their nearby iPhone. The Mac Phone app offers many features iPhone users are familiar with, including Favorites, Recents, and Voicemail. It also includes new features that are also available in iOS 26, including Hold Assist and Call Screening.
Hold Assist allows users who are put on hold to save their spot in the queue while waiting for a real person to answer, allowing them to continue to be productive on their Mac while they wait. Hold Assist alerts users when a human answers, allowing them to quickly pick up the call. The new Call Screening feature automatically answers calls from unknown numbers and asks the caller for information, which it relays to the user, allowing them to decide whether or not to answer the call.
Live Activities on a user’s nearby iPhone will now appear in the Mac’s menu bar, allowing users to stay on top of real-time events, such as sports scores, deliveries, flights, and more, When the user clicks on a Live Activity, the app opens up in iPhone Mirroring to show more information so users can quickly take action from their Mac.
Spotlight
Spotlight now makes it easier than ever for users to find what they’re looking for, as well as new ways to take action. When searching, all results are now listed together — including files, folders, events, apps, messages, and more — and intelligently ranked based on relevance to the user. Improved filtering allows users to quickly narrow searches to exactly what they are searching for. Spotlight can even find documents stored on third-party cloud storage. Spotlight also offers a new browse view, making it easy for users to scan through their apps, files, clipboard history, and other sources.
Spotlight can now perform hundreds of new actions, like creating notes, sending emails, and more, without moving between apps, including third-party apps, thanks to the App Intents API. The new quick keys feature brings the ability for users to enter short strings of characters to lead users to the action they’re looking to perform.
New Apple Intelligence Features
While Apple Intelligence still isn’t where it should be in macOS Tahoe, a few new features are coming to this year’s release.
Live Translation
In the Messages app, users can have their messages automatically translated when communicating with someone who speaks a different language. A message can be typed in the user’s language and delivered to the recipient in their own language.
When the user receives a response, it can be instantly translated. On FaceTime Calls, translated live captons are available while still hearing the speaker’s voice. Calls in the Phone app are also translated in the same way. All translation is performed using Apple-built models that run on-device, so none of your conversations are ever sent to the cloud.
Shortcuts
Shortcuts get more intelligent and powerful than ever. This includes creating images with Image Playground, as well as text summarizing with Writing Tools. Users can tap into Apple Intelligence models, both on-device and with Private Cloud Compute, to generate responses related to the shortcut. Users can also tap into ChatGPT if they’d like. Shortcuts can now be run automatically on macOS and scheduled for a certain time of day or be set to run when taking specific actions, such as saving a file to a particular folder.
Genmoji and Image Playground
There are now new ways to create Genmoji, such as starting with an exiting emoji and description in Image Playground, and modifying attributes and expressions, creating new styles, such as vector art or different painting styles.
Reminders
Apple Intelligence can now review an email, website, note, or other content to unearth the most relevant action items. Users can also instruct Apple Intelligence to automatically categorize Reminders into sections, making them more manageable.
Games App
A new dedicated Apple Games app provides a central home for Mac users games, including those that were installed from outside of the Mac App Store or Apple Arcade. The new app allows users to more easily discover new games, play with friends, and more. A new Game Overlay feature allows gamers to quickly adjust their system settings, chat with friends, invite friends to play, and more, without ever leaving the game they are playing.
A new low-power mode extends gaming sessions while maximizing playtime while running on battery power. macOS Tahoe also brings Metal 4, which provides more advanced graphics and rendering technologies to games, providing smoother visuals and faster frame rates.
Other New Features
macOS Tahoe 26 also brings several other new and improved features.
Safari now offers a rounded tab design that floats in the toolbar, as well as a refreshed sidebar that helps users better find saved content. Apple says Safari is 50% faster than Chrome at loading frequently visited websites while providing an additional four hours of battery life when viewing streaming video. Safari also now offers advanced fingerprinting protection in all browsing by default.
The Messages app now offers backgrounds, polls, and a redesigned details view to better navigate conversations. New typing indicators show who is about to comment in a group conversation, and users can add new contacts easily from the group chat. Search now uses more natural language.
Journal is now available on the Mac, making it possible for users to write about their day or special events whenever they’d like. Multiple journals can be kept and synced across all Apple devices.
The Photos app has an updated Liquid Glass design, enhanced customization, easier workflows, and more. Pinned Collections are now available on the Mac, and filtering and sorting options are available in all views.
Notes offer the ability to import and export notes into markdown files and now offers support for capturing conversations in the Phone app and audio recordings with transcriptions.
FaceTime has a redesigned landing page featuring contact posters of recent callers, floating Liquid Glass controls, and more.
macOS Tahoe 26 is now available in beta form to developers, via the Apple Developer Program at developer.apple.com, and a public beta will be available through the Apple Beta Software Program in July at beta.apple.com. The release will be available as a free software update to the public this fall.
