Samsung’s next foldable line-up may have just leaked ahead of schedule. A new image appears to show screen protectors for the upcoming Galaxy Z Flip 8, Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra side by side.

While leaked screen protectors aren’t usually the most exciting reveal, this one offers an early look at how Samsung could be reshaping its foldable range.

Most notably, the Galaxy Z Fold 8 appears wider and slightly shorter than previous models. Meanwhile, the Fold 8 Ultra looks set to sit in a class of its own.

If the leak is accurate, it suggests Samsung is putting more distance between its standard Fold and Ultra models. The company may no longer treat the Ultra as a simple spec bump. That could help the company better compete. After all, rivals such as Apple, Xiaomi and Vivo continue to push into the foldable market.

AI AND ml

PwC says AI hiring jumped 61 percent despite wider slowdown in vacancies, with employers increasingly looking for workers who can use AI rather than build it

Britain’s AI jobs boom is creating a two-track labor market, according to PwC, which just so happens to make a healthy living helping companies navigate AI-driven transformation.

The consulting giant’s latest AI Jobs Barometer found hiring for AI specialists in the UK jumped 61 percent over the past year, rising from 112,000 roles in 2024 to 180,000 in 2025, even as overall job vacancies across the economy fell by 6.6 percent.

That headline figure is the sort of thing consultancies put in press releases, but the more interesting bit comes later.

PwC’s analysis suggests employers aren’t rushing to hire hordes of machine learning engineers and model builders. Instead, they’re increasingly looking for people who can use AI inside existing professions and business functions. The firm found that so-called AI user roles grew by almost 66,000 positions during the year, while AI developer roles increased by just 2,600.

After years of declaring that AI will revolutionize everything from accounting to sandwich-making, companies appear to have reached the awkward stage where somebody actually must make the technology useful.

PwC argues the result is a “two-track” labor market. Jobs where AI helps skilled workers automate repetitive tasks and focus on higher-value work are growing faster than roles where the technology mainly makes tasks easier and lowers barriers to entry.

According to the report, roles most enhanced by AI have grown by 39 percent since 2018, compared with 17 percent growth in jobs where AI is primarily simplifying work.

The firm’s wage data tells a similar story. Jobs requiring AI skills now command an average wage premium of 34.2 percent, up from 11 percent a year ago. Consumer market companies are offering premiums as high as 64 percent, while government and public sector employers top out at 12 percent.

That’s certainly good news for workers with AI skills. It’s also not the sort of conclusion likely to upset a firm that advises clients on AI strategy for a living.

The findings land against a backdrop of growing anxiety about AI’s impact on employment. Recent polling found one in five Britons believes AI-driven layoffs could eventually trigger civil unrest, while another survey found that office workers are already spending nearly six hours every week checking, correcting, or redoing work generated by AI tools.

For all the excitement around AI, the hiring surge appears to be concentrated in a surprisingly old-fashioned category: people who know what they’re doing. ®

SOFTWARE

Linux app packaging rethink could leave alternative-init distros in the cold

Flatpak development has been very quiet for years. Discussions about a next-generation take are happening – and some of the signs are worrying if, like many FOSS folks, you are systemd-intolerant.

In the course of researching our article on MX Linux 25.2, we came across an interesting Reddit discussion from last month, which in turn led us to a Flatpak development blog post from late last year.

It looks like a team is collecting ideas for what is currently called “Flatpak-NG” – as in next generation. If this solidifies into code, this may form the basis of Flatpak version 2.

The blog post isn’t very informative, but the Reddit thread links to the video of a presentation from last month’s Linux App Summit in Berlin, which spells things out more clearly.

The Flatpak-NG idea involves handing off a lot of the isolation in Flatpak from the current bubblewrap layer to an as-yet-unwritten systemd component that the developers are currently calling systemd-appd. This would considerably simplify Flatpak, and enable it to do more isolation, including virtualizing the network stack – but at the price of making Flatpak 2 depend on systemd. A developer who was at the talk, Jorge Castro, later explained and confirmed this in a Fediverse thread.

The teams behind other init systems could, of course, write their own replacement for the notional systemd-appd, but that would be a substantial amount of work. The tool that provides the new init-switching functionality in MX Linux 25.1 and 25.2, init-diversity, currently supports six other init systems besides systemd, and we’ve seen little sign of them cooperating to create an alternative to systemd that provides even a subset of its wider functionality.

Flatpak is widely used and supported. Not all distros include it by default, but it’s the only widely adopted alternative to Canonical’s Snap packaging system.

Snap is more versatile: it works fine with shell programs, and even the kernel can be packaged as a Snap, which is how Ubuntu Core handles it. Snap’s implementation is much simpler and cleaner than Flatpak’s, as is the distribution model – which, as we’ve reported before, is entirely open source. The only proprietary part is Canonical’s Snap Store website. The trouble is, the louder advocates in the peanut gallery rarely even think about things like implementation details; they just get upset about more visible things that are easier to understand – such as who owns a website.

There are other alternatives out there, such as AppImage, 0install, AppDir, and GNUstep’s implementation of NeXT and Apple’s .app format. We have compared these in detail before.

Only two really have wide adoption, though. There’s Snap, which Canonical claims has more users simply because Ubuntu has more users than all the other desktop distros put together, and there’s Flatpak, which is used by every other distro with any kind of cross-distro package support.

The snag is, if Flatpak 2 does arrive in a year or two, and requires systemd, then that could spell the end of Flatpak support on many systemd-free distros. That includes MX Linux, Alpine Linux, Devuan, Slackware, and many other smaller projects. For many of these, Flatpak is a lifeline: the only way to access much of the wider Linux app market.

It’s not so much that the Flatpak-NG team is the “A-Team,” but the only team. In the original A-Team, Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith was wont to say “I love it when a plan comes together.” We suspect a lot of people will not love it if this plan comes together. ®

According to the companies, it would create the third-largest player in US TV.

Razorpay, the Bengaluru payments company, has filed draft papers for an initial public offering through India’s confidential route, according to people familiar with the matter. The filing moves one of the country’s larger fintech firms a step closer to the public markets, without yet putting its financials on public display.

The confidential mechanism, which Indian regulators have permitted in recent years, lets a company submit a draft red herring prospectus to the Securities and Exchange Board of India and the exchanges while keeping business, operational, and financial detail out of public view until later in the process. It buys time and discretion, which is why a string of well-known names have used it.

People familiar with the plans put the issue at between Rs 5,000 crore and Rs 6,000 crore, which at the upper end is roughly $700m, and suggest a listing could value the company at Rs 50,000 crore to Rs 60,000 crore.

Those figures come from sources rather than from Razorpay, and the company has not confirmed them. The size and terms can change before the offer is made public.

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Razorpay was founded in 2014 by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar and built out from payment acceptance into banking, payouts, payroll, and lending. It was valued at $7.5bn in a December 2021 round, a mark set during the last cycle of large private fintech valuations.

The listing has a longer backstory in the company’s corporate structure. In 2025, Razorpay completed a reverse flip, shifting its parent’s domicile from the United States back to India, a move that carried an estimated $150m tax bill and is a near-prerequisite for an Indian listing. The confidential filing is the next item on that checklist.

Razorpay would join a run of Indian technology firms that relocated their domicile home before listing, a pattern driven by the depth of India’s retail investor market and by regulators’ preference for domestic incorporation.

The reverse flip is the costly part of that decision, since it crystallises a tax charge, but it is the price of access to the exchange on which these companies increasingly want to trade.

The 2021 valuation is the figure that hangs over the listing. At $7.5bn, it was set at the top of the last funding cycle, and the valuation reports now circulating, at the rupee equivalent of roughly $6–7bn at the upper end, would mark a more sober number than the private peak. That gap, between a late-cycle private mark and what public investors will pay, is the question many of this cohort of fintechs are testing as they come to market.

What comes next is procedural. Under the confidential route, a fuller prospectus and the financials it contains become public at a later stage, before the offer opens. Until then, the headline numbers remain attributed to people who know the plans rather than to the company.

‘Children will be given back their childhoods’, the UK government said in a statement.

The UK is the latest to ban social media for underage users, as countries across the world reassess Big Tech’s impact on children’s growth and safety.

“Children will be given back their childhoods…with less time for scrolling and more time for play”, the UK government said in a statement today (15 June).

The government is blanket banning under 16s from a number of large user-to-user platforms that enable social interaction and allow users to post in an algorithmic feed, such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.

Livestreaming and “stranger communication” functionalities are also being banned, although, communication platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal narrowly avoided the government’s hand, despite safety issues associated with them.

“These restrictions – which together with the ban go further than any other country – will apply to a wider range of online services, including on gaming sites,” the government said.

The announcement follows a major public consultation in the country that received more than 100,000 responses submitted by parents, children and experts.

The data showed that 90pc of parents were in support of a social media ban for under-16s, and two-thirds of young people agree that under-16s should not be allowed to use at least some social media platforms.

The UK said that it is expanding on the same model for the ban as Australia, which became the first country to restrict social media for underage users last December.

Age-gating is an industry-wide challenge that often requires the use of AI or sensitive data collection by platforms or third-party services.

An Australian government-authorised report from last year found that age estimation technology also has a “margin of error” – meaning children could be wrongly estimated to be older than they are, while other issues such as VPN usage, joint family accounts or fake accounts also persist.

The UK’s media regulator Ofcom is expected to conduct new research on effective age assurances, review its enforcement capabilities and draft a clear enforcement strategy.

Restrictions will be in place by default for those under 16 and 17 to prevent a cliff-edge at 16, while the government said it will also look into possible overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for under-18-year-olds.

The government is also enforcing a minimum age of 18 for AI ‘romantic companions’ – chatbots designed to roleplay with users.

“This is a line in the sand. Tech giants had their chance and failed, but we’re stepping in to protect children, back parents and set a new normal for future generations,” said prime minister Keir Starmer, echoing comments made by French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, who told the media in January that “children’s brains are not for sale”.

Alongside the UK, France and Australia, countries such as Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Spain and Greece have also made a similar move to restrict social media usage by children, which comes at a time when social media giants including Meta, Google and X face increasing regulatory scrutiny over child safety on their platforms.

Meanwhile, the EU, which also calls for a bloc-wide minimum age to access social media, video-sharing platforms and AI companions attempts to develop an app to enable anonymous age verification.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

UK prime minister Keir Starmer holding a press conference on children’s online well-being. Image: Number 10 via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

A new survey shows households with children under age 18 are experiencing economic strain, with parents suffering from depression, burnout, and hopelessness. 

Capita launched the new national survey, Quarterly Insights from American Families, in partnership with YouGov. The survey will be conducted quarterly.

“This is the baseline,” said Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow with Capita. “We really want to be able to ask questions that serve as an early warning system for family well-being.”

Haspel said what stood out to him from the survey is “how much parents are facing precarity right now… I think that it tells us that families are really struggling and they really need support.”

The questions

YouGov, on behalf of Capita, surveyed 1,000 parents with children under age 18 between Feb. 2 and Feb. 16, 2026. North Carolina is one of four states that were oversampled in the survey, meaning the results are especially representative of those facing parents in our state. 

The survey consists of 69 questions (available here) designed to track families across three dimensions: stability, predictability, and quality of life. Capita defines the question underlying each dimension:

• Stability: Can families meet basic needs without falling into crisis?
• Predictability: Can they plan their lives without constant disruption?
• Quality of life: Do they have the time, health, and connection to flourish, not just survive?

Haspel explained that this survey is meant to fill the gap between surveys such as RAPID, which focuses on parents and caregivers of young children, and surveys of all Americans more broadly.

He said two-thirds of the survey questions will remain the same each time, and another third will shift based on Capita’s specific areas of interest at a given moment.

Haspel pointed out that for all Americans, life can be stressful, and parenting in particular will always come with its own stressors.

“The issue is, what are the artificial, unnecessary stressors that we put on families as a result of policy choices?” Haspel said. 

The answers

One of the main findings from the survey revolves around the economic pressure that families are facing. As the Capita report puts it: “Multiple indicators point to significant and widespread financial stress.”

Here are some of those indicators:

• More than a third were worried at some point in the last year that food would run out before they had money to buy more — and almost as many actually had that happen. 
• One in 5 reported skipping out on needed medical care due to costs in the last year, and 15% skipped filling a prescription for the same reason. 
• In the last three months, 20% of households reported a member losing a job or having their hours cut.
• In the last month, 25% of respondents said they had a shift canceled, shortened, or extended with less than 24 hours’ notice. The same percentage were required to be “on call” — available without guaranteed hours — during that period. 

Financial stress can be a leading driver of “toxic stress.” This compounding, long-term stress can do permanent damage to the health of parents and the development of children — and can sometimes lead to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). 

Evidence shows that safe, stable, and nurturing relationships with adults can protect children from the negative outcomes of ACEs and toxic stress. But the survey suggests most parents are struggling to maintain that kind of relationship with their children. 

Two-thirds of respondents said that in the last month, stress made it hard to be as patient with their children as they wanted to be. And half of parents reported feeling down, depressed, or hopeless in the last two weeks. 

There are several questions in the survey that pertain specifically to work and child care. Here are some related findings:

• More than 70% of respondents describe their job as family friendly.
• Almost two-thirds said family life is a top priority, and they want their job to fit around it.
• In the last year, 27% of respondents missed work or lost pay because of child care problems.
• One in 5 parents regularly supervise their children while working. 

Despite the challenges presented by scheduling, about 70% of parents report being satisfied with their existing child care situation, whether they have children who are school age or below. And 81% said their communities are welcoming to families with minor children.

But 43% said their work schedules made it hard to keep consistent routines for their children, and that matters. 

“That lack of control over one’s schedule contributes to lack of control over one’s life more broadly, and it can affect parenting relationships,” Haspel said. 

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As the Capita report explains:

Volatile schedules make it hard for people to be the kind of parents they want to be. They may have to forego baseball games or dance recitals they planned to attend, skip sitting down to dinner as a family, or miss tucking their kids into bed. Instability also has a significant impact on child development. Consistent routines are the foundation for children’s growth, learning, and feelings of security. Chronically disrupting those routines not only stresses parents but also interferes with their children’s long-term trajectory. Inconsistent or nonstandard parent work schedules are associated with cognitive delays and behavioral outcomes, especially if they begin during a child’s first year of life. 

“Job quality or schedule quality is often thought of as labor policy, it’s not thought of as a family policy,” Haspel said. “If you care about having strong, healthy families, this is a contributing factor.”

The meaning

While this first set of survey results represent the baseline of what Capita plans to measure over time, there are still significant takeaways from this early warning system. 

“A lot of what we’ve been hearing around the issues with affordability, the issues with being able to navigate all the extra challenges of parenting in 2020s America is showing up in family well-being,” Haspel said. 

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Here’s what Capita has to say about the initial survey results:

This first survey of Quarterly Insights paints a troubling picture of families feeling economic strain and suffering from depression, burnout, and hopelessness. These conditions reinforce one another, making it harder for parents to show up for their children, their partners, and themselves, maintain routines, and flourish. Ultimately, all of these factors make stability feel perpetually out of reach. While the heaviest burdens often land on those earning the least, working-class and middle-class families also feel the enormous weight of these compounding pressures.

The report goes on to point out that policies supporting the well-being of children and families are most likely to succeed if they address multiple aspects of family hardship and reach all families who are affected. 

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Editor’s note: This article was corrected to say that four states were oversampled in the Capita survey.

Katie Dukes

Katie Dukes is the director of early childhood policy at EdNC.

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Thank goodness for Siri AI, because if the only updates with macOS Golden Gate were the other ones shown at WWDC, this would be the weakest release in history.

As it is, the new macOS Golden Gate is a significant and even dramatic update, but solely because of how useful Siri AI is. True, there is more to the update than Apple said, but all it mentioned was a Liquid Glass refinement, improved curves on windows, and a reworking of the sidebar.

If that sounds like only an incredibly little difference from macOS Tahoe, it’s actually even smaller than you think. That Liquid Glass refinement is a slider to let users control how translucent it is, but it works across such a narrow range that it’s not worth bothering with.

So Siri AI is the star and even in its very first form, it is already so very close to excellent. Every year there comes a moment when the previous macOS seems amazingly old, and this time it’s when you first use Siri AI.

This slider in macOS System Settings controls Liquid Glass, but don’t expect to see much difference.

It’s the feature you immediately adopt and that when you turn to a Mac without it, you miss it. Siri AI truly is a dramatic improvement, although it is far from perfect.

macOS Golden Gate beta review — Siri AI wins

I did wonder whether it would be hard to use the new Siri AI because I’m so used to how it used to work. I’m used to asking one thing at a time, then muttering when Siri gets it wrong, and asking it again, then sarcastically saying thank you.

With the new Siri, though, the first thing I thought of was to ask about a concert I booked a year or more ago. I didn’t remember the date, and I could have searched my calendar, but I also wasn’t sure whether the tickets were being kept at the box office.

So I just asked Siri when I am seeing Dar Williams, and also where the tickets are. It pretty immediately showed me the date, the venue, and the email that had the tickets in.

It took Siri AI thirty seconds to check my calendar and find a specific email buried deep in my archive.

Just as I could have searched my calendar, of course, I could have searched my emails but I didn’t know if the tickets were there. Plus you know how long it takes to find anything in Mail, so having this close to instant result is a genuinely useful boon.

Similarly, as much as I like Apple Maps, I find it a bit irritating when I’m just looking up a place instead of trying to find a route. But then also when I want a route with multiple stops, it’s not as if it’s hard, but it’s now so much easier to ask Siri AI.

Consequently, I asked it for a route to a venue I have to speak at, arriving at a certain time on a specific day, and also including a stop at a colleague’s home to pick up various things for the event. It just did it.

I have a long drive ahead of me. But Siri AI made finding a multi-stop route very quick.

Or rather, it eventually just did it. No question, Siri AI is superb, but sometimes it has frozen on me, sometimes it has said it can’t do something. It has taken me three goes on occasion, but it has then worked.

macOS Golden Gate beta review — Siri AI failings

Part of the problem is that Siri AI is now in Spotlight. In most ways, that is superb. Instead of being off in some separate Talk to Siri feature, it’s now right there where you might spend much of your time anyway.

But as you type, Spotlight will go through figuring out whether you’re looking for a document, or an application. Sometimes it is poor at realizing that you want to ask Siri AI a question.

For some reason, though, there is a solution. Once you’ve typed your question, you can hold down the Command key and that tells Spotlight you want to Ask Siri.

I have not one thin clue how I stumbled across that, but I’m using it a lot now and it never fails. And I am also using Siri AI much more than I expected. If I want anything that is on my Mac, I’ll ask Siri AI and while this might just be that it’s a new toy, it really feels as if it’s already part of my workflow.

However, if I ask for something that requires what Apple calls “World Knowledge,” Siri AI stops being excellent. It becomes much more like any other AI, and sometimes it isn’t as good as them.

So for instance, when I start researching an article, I will now routinely do a search for every time I’ve written on AppleInsider about the same topic before. Google was never all that use for this, but Claude AI is excellent at surfacing them.

Siri AI is not. It doesn’t always find the articles I want, and sometimes it will find some but not include any links. I’ve seen this with all AI chatbots and am used to sighing and typing “prove it.”

But in the last such search I did with Siri AI, it did provide links but the first one I tried went to the wrong site. It was the right topic, but the article shown wasn’t on AppleInsider and wasn’t written by me.

That is typical of AI search results. Only, that same search did surface notes I’d made on the topic for a previous podcast recording. I’d entirely forgotten those, and Siri AI found them.

If something is on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, then Siri AI is superb. If it’s on the web, it’s not always so hot.

macOS Golden Gate beta review — more Apple Intelligence

It used to be that there was a section in System Settings called “Siri and Apple Intelligence.” That has now changed to just Siri.

So it appears as if there is no longer a switch to turn off Apple Intelligence. It’s not clear yet whether turning off Siri will do that too.

It is clearer that Apple is trying to put some water between Siri and the rest of Apple Intelligence, because there are AI features that are separate. At present, you have to join a waitlist to get Siri AI, but even before you get the new Siri, there are many Apple Intelligence features in macOS Golden Gate.

For instance, if you open an image in the Photos app, choose Edit, and then click on Tools, you now get the options to reframe or extend the image that Apple demonstrated. With the right sort of image, extension is excellent.

The original photograph of me looking grumpy for no reason.

I took a close-up shot of myself against a wooden background, and in moments that background was far wider. Not only did it successfully duplicate the background, it also edited it. So seeing that there was light on one side of my face, it lit that edge of the frame as if there were a window just out of shot.

It also interpreted my stony face as being annoyed, so it gave me folded arms. That felt weird, but it didn’t look wrong.

Reframing of that same image worked, too, or at least mostly. It’s a more limited tool than it seemed in the WWDC keynote, but it did allow me to tilt my head and whole body back, as if I had taken a low-angle shot.

The same shot but with the background greatly extended. Sometimes when I try this, Photos also adds in folded arms.

If I shifted the frame to the left or right, it also worked. But along the way it briefly gave me an extended neck.

So it really does depend on your image, because you are as likely as not to get terrible distortion.

Still, I often create poster images for various projects and being able to extend the background will be a boon. It will mean I can have space to add a headline, for instance.

Photos can now turn the subject to the side, although apparently it can’t make me more cheeful.

That will be an occasional thing I do, it hasn’t so immediately become part of my daily workflow as Siri AI has. But then there is one other macOS feature that has definitely changed how I work, at least most of the time.

It’s the new natural language Shortcuts, the way that you can describe what you want and the Shortcuts app will create it for you. When it works, I cannot see any reason you’d make Shortcuts any other way.

If only it worked all the time.

macOS Golden Gate beta — Shortcuts are mixed

If you open the Shortcuts app on Mac, iPhone, or iPad now, you get a prominent New Shortcut button. Choose that and you are asked to describe what you want.

On the Mac, you practically have to dodge around that button to get anything done manually. It is that prominent and Apple is clearly pushing this verbal Shortcuts.

The prompt for you to describe a Shortcut you want is even more prominent the first time you open the app,

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But then this is a change that will surely introduce more people to Shortcuts, and it’s only one extra step to go around it to manually writing them as before.

However, the results might also put newcomers off because Shortcuts now has that AI-style certainty of what it’s doing, even when it’s wrong. When it is right, though, it is very impressive.

On my iPhone, for instance, I asked for a Shortcut that would change my wallpaper at 6pm every weekday, and as well as doing that, it also set up the automation to run it.

Then on the Mac, I have long wanted a Shortcut that would do some work on my AppleInsider podcast notes. During the show, I’ll tap on my Stream Deck Pedal whenever there’s to be a new chapter, for instance, and I have that send the current time to a note.

But it’s the current running time in minutes, and I then edit in Final Cut Pro, whose time is in hours, minutes, and seconds. So I keep having to stop to think whether 119 minutes is really one hour 59 minutes, or whatever.

I’ve wanted that shortcut that would take 119 minutes and write it out as 01:59:00, and it has always defeated me. Not any more. I asked Shortcuts to do it, and it did.

Note the large icon to the rear where Shortcuts says what it has done, and then in the foreground, what it’s actually produced.

I then asked for various refinements to get the result copied to the clipboard, and it did that, too.

It is really very good, and so very easy that I initially thought there was no possibility that I would ever again want to write a Shortcut by hand. I was an immediate and total convert to the new way of doing them.

That didn’t last.

For years, I’ve also wanted a Shortcut that would switch Tab Groups in Safari and it’s always been impossible on the Mac. You can do it on iPhone and iPad, there is a Shortcuts action to do it, but it’s always fallen over with an “internal error” on the Mac.

So when Shortcuts next asked me what I wanted, I told it, and it did it. It stopped to ask me which Tab Group I wanted, then it presented me with the finished Shortcut including a full description of what it does.

It doesn’t work. It isn’t even close.

If you go into the Shortcut manually, you can see that instead of anything to do with Tab Groups, it’s trying to turn on Do Not Disturb. It doesn’t even reference the specific Tab Group it asked me about.

Incidentally, if you write a Shortcut manually and include the action to change Tab Groups, it still fails as it now has for years and years. There is progress of a sort, though, as in macOS Golden Gate, instead of an unspecific “internal error,” it says it cannot communicate with the app.

Which is a clue both to my problem and to where Apple is putting its attention. Because what’s probably happening is that behind all of this verbal and even manual Shortcut writing, the app is using AppleScript. This is the decades-old automation that can let you do just about anything on a Mac.

But AppleScript works by every app providing access to its features, specifically by providing what’s called a dictionary. You can open the Safari dictionary in Script Editor, and if you do, you’ll see that there’s nothing there to do with tab groups.

So it appears that Apple’s newest natural language Shortcuts tools fail because Apple’s oldest automation technology hasn’t been updated.

It would also appear that Shortcuts has that curse of AI, that inability to say it can’t do something. Except sometimes, it will say exactly that, such as when you try to use it to fix irritations with the Phone app.

macOS Golden Gate beta — Phone app

With macOS Tahoe, Apple brought the Phone app to the Mac and it seemed like it was going to be so useful. If someone calls, you would just answer it on the Mac as you work. If you need to call someone, you would just do it on the Mac without getting out your iPhone.

I had issues that my Mac Studio wasn’t displaying the phone call notification fast enough to stop people hanging up on me. But even if the on-screen notification had appeared at the same time as the ringing sound begins, the green answer button wouldn’t always react to a click.

Nobody can hear you when you use the Phone app on the Mac, unless you know to look under the Video menu to choose the same audio source you’ve already set everywhere else.

What I’d really like is a keystroke to answer a call, and then another keystroke to end it. There is no such keystroke, and while you can add your own to just about anything on the Mac, you can’t with the Phone app.

You also cannot write or describe a Shortcut that answers for you. If you could, you could attach that Shortcut to, say, a Stream Deck button, but you can’t.

And this is one case where the new Shortcuts says no. “I can’t create shortcuts for physical actions like answering a phone call,” it says.

So there is some error-trapping in the new Shortcuts, but it doesn’t know to say it can’t do other things, like the Safari tab groups.

But then maybe we shouldn’t expect the Phone app to be useful, because with macOS Tahoe, it seemed as if Apple abandoned it part way. By default, for example, no one could hear you when you used it to make or answer a call, which seems fundamental.

It turns out that regardless of any Sound settings you have, you have to expressly tell the Phone app to use a given microphone. And you tell it this via a menu called Video.

A phone app has a video menu. That hasn’t changed with macOS Golden Gate.

macOS Golden Gate beta — visual changes

Something that has changed with the new macOS is how the Mac looks. It’s so subtle with adjustments such as the Liquid Glass slider that it might as well not be there, but it is.

It’s not much more pronounced with app icons, but it does make a difference. App icons in the Dock do seem to pop, and it means that transparent ones are clearer, too.

There’s also how menus have shed their mass of icons. With macOS Tahoe, every menu item had its own icon and the result was a mess, but calmness has now been restored.

All of which is good and all of which is welcome, but overall this really would be an incredibly slight update if it weren’t for Siri AI.

Still, up to now, Siri has felt like it was really just for the iPhone and maybe also the iPad. With the Mac, because your hands are already on the keys, it seemed quicker to just type instead of interrupt your work to talk to Siri.

Now Siri somehow feels much more a part of the Mac, and that by itself means that macOS Golden Gate is a significant update.

macOS Golden Gate beta — Pros

• Siri AI for any information on your Mac is fantastic
• Natural language Shortcuts are usually brilliant
• Photos app improvements can be superb, depending on the image
• Minor visual updates are welcome

macOS Golden Gate beta — Cons

• Siri AI World Knowledge is poor
• Liquid Glass control is very limited
• Natural language Shortcuts is sometimes just wrong
• Years-old Shortcuts error remains
• Phone app still feels abandoned

macOS Golden Gate beta review rating: 4 out of 5

• Microsoft is changing the way that Windows 11 updates are delivered
• The likes of .NET, driver or firmware updates will be bundled together with the monthly update
• This change is now in testing, alongside a lot of work to make Windows 11’s default apps better

Windows 11 is getting some more very useful changes, including an improved process for updates and a raft of tweaks for the default apps in the OS.

Microsoft has just released a new preview in the Experimental channel (build 26300.8687) which packs the changes for Windows Update (which were announced as incoming a while back in April).