My first 24 hours with Siri AI on Mac

I turned off Siri on the Mac years ago and never looked back. Likewise, I found Apple Intelligence useless. But the new Siri AI coming to macOS 27 Golden Gate got me a little rethink things.

It’s still early to test Siri AI, as I’ve had access to it in the macOS 27 maintenance beta for more than 24 hours. It’s also in early dev beta, so there should be a lot of improvements before it’s released later this year. I don’t know if it has already been done to index files and folders in our review section M5 MacBook Air and M5 Max MacBook Pro. Unlike the iOS 27 dev beta, there is no “indexing” box on the settings page. I asked Siri if she could tell me, but she told me to click a button in Settings that doesn’t exist.

My friends tried to test Siri AI on iPhone and Apple WatchI started reading its general vibeand so far they have had good user reviews. My thoughts are a little mixed.

When I’m sitting down at the laptop I don’t need a voice assistant to search for random things I’m interested in or check the weather like I would on a phone; I can do this quickly and accurately with a keyboard and mouse. So I tried to think of ways to allow Siri AI to help me on macOS – things that would be useful for me in my daily work.

I’d be happy to update some of the time-consuming benchmarks I do when I review laptops, but while Siri AI can launch apps, it can’t do anything inside them (not that Apple ever said it could). I then tried to see if vibe coding several Shortcuts he can take me there instead. This is not a feature of Siri AI, but a new feature of Apple Intelligence. I asked Shortcuts to run a test in Geekbench or Cinebench, capture the results on screen, wait a few minutes, and repeat twice. But the automations that followed were no longer able to pass the test. Apple Intelligence created a shortcut that opened Geekbench and took screenshots (but forgot about running the benchmark), and created a shortcut for Cinebench that had “Wait for the test” as a specific step. Maybe if the developers continue to grow Purpose of the App this may work one day.

So if Siri can’t help me run my benchmarks, maybe it can help me be a little faster with data entry. In my normal routine, I run each benchmark three times, take pictures as I go, and then calculate the results before posting them on the pages. Apple’s WWDC keynote showed someone using Ask Siri in Spotlight to scan the contents of local files. So I tried selecting those image groups in the Finder and asking Siri to calculate my number. It worked well – most of the time.

It was smart enough to distinguish single-core CPU scores from multicore CPU scores and multi-GPU, average test results, and organize them into easy-to-read tables. But it can be thrown away if I include screenshots of many types of tests, especially when I mix them with synthetic results (Geekbench, PugetBench, etc.) and time-based results (Blender provides tests with our 4K video transmission tests). And sometimes it’s thrown away by the CPU settings that appear in the Cinebench screenshots. That way, I can have Siri AI accurately calculate 15 points or averages from several of my photos at the same time – which can save me a lot of time. But for now, it will help me a little. And unless it goes well I’m willing to keep doing it myself, especially since Siri messed up the numbers a few times while pulling errors.

So far, Siri AI seems more capable inside the Apple ecosystem than it is outside of it, even with apps and files that are already on my Mac but in non-Apple apps. When I asked Siri to find pictures of cats or babies, she pulled up results from Apple’s Apps and Messages. This may be enough for most people, but not for me. Most of my messaging is done in Signal, and photos from my phone are stored in Google Photos, not iCloud. Siri also missed thousands of photos I have in my Lightroom Classic catalog, even though the files were stored locally in the Photos folder and I kept asking her to find them directly. It’s possible that these files haven’t been written yet, but I have no way of knowing.

Right now, I’m getting the same vibes from time to time I tried Copilot Vision last year. Like Copilot Vision, you can use Siri’s Visual Intelligence to ask questions about content on your website. And like Copilot, it’s limited. I asked Siri to review the benchmark results on a spreadsheet in Google Sheets, but it can’t see everything if it’s not visible on both screens at once. I could have seen the whole page by downloading it as an Excel file and pointing to Siri in the Finder, but when I asked for a laptop with one of the highest Geekbench scores it gave me more. Not good.

I opened Siri and ran Lightroom Classic, on a black and white photo from mine Ricoh GR IV Monochrome Reviewand ask Siri how to make it look like a shot from a street photographer Alan Schaller. Siri offered specific adjustments to exposure, contrast, etc., and changing those values ​​gave me great results. Unfortunately, when I asked Siri to judge the results, she surprised me, saying that I nailed the feature and got “permanent feedback,” which is the kind of behavior that Apple says it shouldn’t display. (I thought we were past this.)

Then I uploaded a classic Garry Winograd photo and ask how I can change my Lightroom settings to match the photo; Siri prompted me to show the previous price. So, some hit and some miss.

It’s still early days for Siri AI, and much may change between now and the final release. But what is already clear is that the experience can be very different on the iPhone, where your information is stored within Apple’s programs, and on the Mac, where you can be moving between all kinds of programs and environments in ways that limit what Siri can do. Even so, with little praise, this is a very useful and effective Siri. It’s Apple’s real AI baby steps.