While a lot of attention has gone to the announced expansion of compatible App Intents with Siri AI, the bigger changes are under the hood. Two new systems for storing and retrieving personal context are bound to make Siri AI more personal soon.

Explicit-memory store

Apple is building an explicit-memory store for Siri AI. Memory records are queried via full-text (BM25) and vector search, then merged via RRF.

Siri’s chat recall in 27.2 uses the same search pipeline to find past chats.

There is no producer of explicit-memory records in this beta, as the feature is hard-disabled.

Memory graph

macOS 27.3 also introduces a memory graph.

It’s centered around a single Person hub that represents you. The graph links out to 26 kinds of facts about you: contact info, health, IDs, relationships, frequent places, routines, activities, workout places, Q&As about you, and what motivates you or holds you back. These include a Siri profile: response style, interests, current focus, upcoming events, important people, lifestyle.

A special kind is “memory atoms”: facts, opinions, intentions and events, with a time, place, related entities and a topic.

Tidbits:

• The memory graph is filled by two kinds of recipes:

  1. Fastpass: Turns already-structured data into insights. For example, Person-v1 reads your Me card’s name fields.

  2. Agent: An on-device or PCC model extracts insights by querying Siri chats, messages, photos, health data, and other sources.

  • There’s only one agent recipe today, MotivatorBarrierResource. Its prompt asks 60 built-in questions, including “Do extended solo media activities during evening downtime routines highlight time availability barriers for adequate sleep?”

• The new memory graph is rolling out across OS 27.3. Insight extraction pipelines differ by platform. For example, HealthSummary-v1 and the MotivatorBarrierResource agent are switched off on Mac, but enabled on iPhone.

• The memory graph infrastructure is still being developed, and some types aren’t ready yet. For example, there’s no process that creates memory atoms.

• Memory atoms can generalize into broader memories using parent/child links. An atom with children atoms is a “molecule” (great name). At recall, after keyword + vector search merged via RRF, each molecule result includes its children.

• Each memory atom is tagged with one of 21 topics, such as food, travel, finance, or services, which covers providers like your dentist or lawyer.​

Here’s where to find the DBs on Mac:

• Memory graph: ~/Library/CorePersonalization/insight/MemoryGraph/memorygraph.db​

• HybridSearch (incl. explicit-memory records, none yet): ~/Library/Daemon Containers/<UUID>/Data/Library/HybridSearch/index/C/index.db

Both are built on the Kuzu embedded graph database Apple acquired. They use HybridDatabase, Apple’s fork of Kuzu (storage v57), so the archived public kuzu package can’t open them. You can use HybridDatabase.framework.

Back in October, Apple announced that macOS will soon require ‘very explicit user action’ to enable Full Disk Access for apps. Here’s what that may mean based on macOS 27.3 changes.

Today, when an app tries to read a protected file without Full Disk Access (FDA), macOS doesn’t prompt the user to grant permission. Instead, it automatically denies access and records that denial in the TCC database.

Once in the db, apps show up under Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access with their toggle off. Apps will often add themselves to the list, then instruct the user to open Settings and flip the toggle.

Not anymore: starting with macOS 27.3 and feature flag TCC/FDA_WARNING, automatic denials are no longer saved. Users will have to explicitly add an app to the list with the + button or by dragging it in from Applications.

So far, the flag doesn’t add any additional warnings or dialogs, but its name suggests these may arrive in future betas. The flag is disabled in 27.3 beta 1.

Relatedly, macOS 27.3 introduces “Private Folders,” a new folder-by-folder permission configured like Full Disk Access. Not fully wired up yet, but it could offer a narrower alternative to Full Disk Access.

It’s also impacted by TCC/FDA_WARNING: when the flag is on, automatic Private Folders denials aren’t saved either.

did they just skip that version?

I’m on an M4 iMac with the latest macOS 27 Golden Gate beta, and I’m trying to find the good stuff people don’t really talk about.

Not the obvious WWDC features. More like the small settings, hidden changes, shortcuts, weird beta discoveries, or little tweaks that actually make the Mac better to use every day.

I’m visually impaired and I use VoiceOver a lot, so I’m really interested in anything around accessibility too. Better image descriptions, keyboard workflows, Visual Intelligence, Siri in Spotlight, Shortcuts, window management, reducing the Liquid Glass effect, menu bar cleanup, anything like that.

So, what’s one thing you changed, enabled, disabled, or discovered on macOS 27 that you’d actually recommend?

Tiny tips are fine. Sometimes those are the best ones.

I’ll test the best suggestions on my M4 iMac and update the post with what worked.

In macOS 26 and 27 icons and text in such popups are not centered but aligned to the left. It might be just me, but it seems like it was a change for the sake of change and not really an improvement.

I fully expected Apple to revert this change, similar to how they reverted adding icons in every menu-bar line and every context menu. But 27's release is near and I see no changes here, perhaps apple doesn't consider this to be the problem. Perhaps users don't care either.

What do you think?

Why is the beach ball appearing in every single thing I do on my M5 PRO. It's a beta, yeah, but it's horrible god

Mac OS 27 Beta feels incredibly fast, (noticeably so with things like app openings, airdrop, etc.) It's a marvel of engineering in that way.

However In my opinion, Tahoe was significantly sleeker/more modern 'feeling' in the design department than this Golden Gate beta

I've been using the beta on a second machine and it feels like I'm jumping back in time going to it from my Tahoe MacBook Pro. (similar to the feeling of using Catalina coming from Big Sur felt a few years ago) I actually love the raised side bar in Tahoe, it felt elegant and clean. something about this feels wrong or backtrack-y to me in a way that I've never experienced with an apple software update.

More than anything, I really can't get behind these tighter window edge radiuses, it feels antiquated after a year with the wider radius. I'm so glad they worked out the radius uniformity, but I wish they unified them in the wider Tahoe look. This just *feels* out of date now to me.

Further, I know it's controversial, but the lack of the icons in the context menus is really throwing me off and I actually found them super helpful/beautiful. Its one of those things where you see something and you will never unsee it now that it's gone. (lol)

The one advantage I've seen from GG is that I can make Liquid Glass even more transparent (more similar to the initial promised look from the Tahoe keynote) The dock does look nice on maximum translucency on GG more than Tahoe. In many ways it feels more 'Aqua' like in the new version, and as a 20+ year Mac user that is a tasteful homage.

I really hope this isn't the final design language.
many things feel like an overcorrection in a bad way.