June 2026: Member Q&A

Welcome to the June 2026 PMUG podcast. Today, we’re going to answer members’ questions and learn some interesting things. Let’s get started. Okay. Welcome one and all to tonight’s PMUG meeting. It is June 9th, 2026. Let me put this link into chat. It’s a file with some information about the question I’m going to discuss just now, so that you don’t have to write down everything. I’ll paste it in again at the end of tonight’s discussion. Okay, so the first question tonight is, I watched the WWDC keynote, and there was a slide in the keynote that showed a bunch of new features for the new OSs. And I didn’t have enough time to see it because it was only up there for a few seconds. Did you manage to catch it? And if so, what’s the deal? Okay, so for those of you who may not be aware, WWDC is Apple’s yearly developers conference, and they do have a keynote that they stream to everyone. It is currently available if you go to apple.com. You can see the keynote there. They also, Apple has a video podcast where they post these keynotes a couple of days after they are made available. So you can subscribe in your podcatcher of choice if you prefer. But next year’s, well, you know, sort of later this year’s and officially next year’s OSs will be referred to as Golden Gate 27. So the details are at apple.com slash OS right now for all of the supported operating systems. The keynote this year was a bit shorter than normal. It was about an hour. And they did something unusual. They didn’t break down each operating system with the different changes. They basically lumped everything together and discussed all of the features that all of the OSs would have sort of in common. And then they also showed a quick slide. It was up for maybe five seconds or something like that, that showed a bunch of different features. So I did manage to get a list of all of that stuff. And if you click on the link in the chat, you can see the list of all the features. I’m not going to go through all of them.

When I clicked, it opened up my iCloud drive in Finder.

Did it? It’s an iCloud.com address. So it should link you to the file that I shared. Is anyone else having a problem grabbing them? Let me try it here.

I was able to download it. Okay. Maybe we can just put the PDF in the chat.

Yeah, so here’s the deal. If it’s already in your iCloud Drive, it’ll just link to the file that’s in your iCloud Drive.

Okay, I see down at the bottom it says iCloud Drive then June 2026 Q&A info.pdf.

Info.pdf, yeah. That’s the file.

Okay. I’m still trying to understand how to use the finder.

Yes, well, things are going to change in the new OS a bit, hopefully to make things easier to find. We shall see. But they showed a list of 262 new features. Now, to be fair, some of these features are very, very minor. But that’s actually kind of good. because the new OS is kind of like Snow Leopard. They have taken the year off from major new tentpole features. There are some new features, things that they had been promising for a while, that they finally finished. But they mostly, the new features and functionality are all enhancements of existing features So they had a laundry list of complaints from people about how the various OSs worked and ways to make them better. And they have devoted this year to basically going through that list and making improvements. So let’s first talk quickly about the supported devices for the new OSs, because a lot of devices have dropped off the supported list. For Macs, you get no Intel Macs at all. As they said last year, Tahoe is the last OS to support Intel Macs of any kind. And even that was relatively slim. So now the Macs that are supported are the new MacBook Neo, the MacBook Air with Apple Silicon, which is 2020 or later, the MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon, 2020 or later, the iMac with Apple Silicon, 2021 or later, the Mac Mini with Apple Silicon, which is 2020 or later, the Mac Studio Max. Then for phones, phones actually they didn’t drop any phones off the list, although there are some features that won’t be available on older phones. In fact, won’t be available on most of the phones unless you happen to own a iPhone 17 Pro or an iPhone Air. But if you have an iPhone 11 or newer you will be able to upgrade to the Golden Gate release when it comes out later this fall. The best Apple intelligence models, however, require an iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone Air. So there are some features that won’t work if you have an older phone. And for the Macs with the latest and greatest Apple intelligence models, you need a Mac with an M3 chip or newer. So my current Mac mini won’t support the latest and greatest Apple intelligence models. Now, that doesn’t mean Apple intelligence features are going away. That just means that some of the fancy new features that they showed off being able to be done locally on your Mac or your phone, etc., requires a model that can’t run on older hardware. So you’ll still get on-device processing. It just won’t be quite as smart a model as you’ll get if you have a newer device. As far as iPads go, there’s a bunch of iPads that are getting knocked off the supported list. So you need an iPad Air with an M2 or newer. And you need the iPad 9th generation or later. The iPad Pro 11-inch, second generation or later. The iPad Pro 12.9-inch, fourth generation and newer. And the iPad Pro with the M4 chip or later, if one ever gets created. And then iPad Mini 6 or newer. As for Apple Watches, a bunch of Apple Watches are dropping off the supported list. You need a Series 9 or newer. So you can have the latest Apple Watch SE, which is the third generation, the Series 9, 10, 11, 12, etc., when those are available, and the Apple Watch Ultra 2, but not the Apple Watch Ultra 1, which is sort of interesting. And if you want to use certain Apple intelligence features on your watch, that requires the watch to be paired with a nearby compatible iPhone that has the Golden Gate OS installed. And, you know, for those features to work, because most of the processing is not done on the watch, it’s done on the iPhone and then transferred to the watch. So if you’re out and about without your phone, then the Apple Intelligence features won’t work on your watch. You’ll have regular Siri features, etc., but not that. Okay, so what are the tentpole features that they talked about in WWDC? There were a few that they made a point of. Obviously, one of them was Apple Intelligence. They spent a good bit of time talking about Apple Intelligence because two years ago they promised that we would get a new Siri that would have a lot of features that didn’t end up coming. So they are ready now. So they are coming out with the Golden Gate OSs. So things like improved writing assistance, better image playground options with photorealistic options. automatically update compromised or weak passwords without you having to actually go to the website and change it yourself. I find this particularly interesting. If it works well, it will be it’ll be a real game changer because you know it’s a real pain to change all those old you know website passwords that you might have going to them one by one but if the system really can change your password without you having to do anything and then you know store it in your passwords app that’ll be that’ll be really really good I haven’t seen it in use though so I don’t really know how exactly it will work they’ll also have better image manipulation being able to remove things from photos you also interestingly being able to adjust the basically like the the focus of an image so you can in you know expand out from an image you took it will create like fake but realistic looking stuff around the edge of the photo which one of the reasons they said you might want to do that is if you know you didn’t take a straight photo and you want to be able to crop it so that it’s straight you can you know expand the photo out it will create the sort of fake edges then you can crop in on the center where the actual picture is and straighten it out that way without losing any of your your detail so that will be good of course what they showed in the keynote worked really well. And interestingly, they did everything in real time with the AI features. So when they asked Siri questions or when they did one of these features where they were editing an image, they did it in real time. So you actually saw the thing sort of spin while it was working on the issue. and then you saw it actually create the content. I think they did that to get away from the complaints that people had about them faking the look of the feature. They actually showed you like, “Hey, no, this is currently really working.” It is actually a thing you will be able to do. That’s pretty cool. They will have better parental controls, which they now call child safety. If you have kids, you can better control what and how long your kids have access to certain features. They have improved the, like, naughty filter, for lack of a better word, so that if you have a child account associated with your family, you can turn on that feature. And if their phone or their watch or whatever thinks they’re getting either violent or explicit content of any kind, it will automatically blur the content and basically inform the kid that, like, hey, you really probably don’t want to look at this. And then if they do try to go through it, it will let you know if they did. And you can, of course, stop them from being able to unblur it if that is a thing you want to do. And they gave new child safety defaults that are based on current best practice. They’re just basically offerings of like, here’s what we recommend based on, you know, here’s the age of your child. And here’s what, you know, currently is recommended for children of this age. But of course, as a parent, you can make your own choices. That’s just sort of a default. So and perhaps even better, absolutely everything is faster in all of the OSs, even animations. So you’ll be waiting a lot less for stuff. I am interested to see how big an improvement this really is. But they were very clear that, like, you’ll notice a big improvement in things like Spotlight and trying to find information across, you know, hard drives and a variety of other things. So they’ve sped up almost every aspect of every common issue that you run across in all of the OSs. So I think that’s pretty cool.

Excuse me, Eric. In the chat, Jim Thursby has a question about the name GoldenGate. Okay.

In the past, I thought GoldenGate would have been just macOS, and you made it sound like Apple, iPad is running GoldenGate and iPhone is running GoldenGate.

Yeah. So the answer is I’m not 100% sure, but what they show on their website and what they showed in the keynote was they referenced GoldenGate and they talked about all of the OSs when they were talking about that. So I, you know, again, GoldenGate is just a marketing name. So, you know, it is what it is. But, you know, given that they lumped everything together, maybe.

So essentially, don’t be surprised either way.

Yes. I mean, we will certainly know before it launches in the fall. But from what I can tell right now, the answer is, yeah, GoldenGate applies to all the OSs.

And when you said everything is faster, that’s all the supported platforms that can upgrade to OS 27. They’ll run faster on OS 27 than they run today.

That’s correct.

Okay.

And, you know, if true, that is great. Particularly like, for example, if you have an older iPhone and it runs faster on, you know, iOS 27 than it did on 26, that’s a big win. So, you know, you’ll take it. And then, of course, they spent a long time, as I said, talking about Apple intelligence and particularly the new version of Siri, which they’re referring to as Siri AI. And I understand why they did this, because they can’t just keep calling it Siri, because Siri has a sort of, like, reputation. So they gave it a new name. I mean, it’s still called Siri, but it’s AI to make it clear that, like, this is a better, more capable Siri. And since they did everything in sort of real time when they were interacting with Siri, it looks fairly impressive for Siri. If you’ve used AI features on Android, et cetera, this is, you know, nothing was like too different. But for us, it’s a big step up. So now when you’re interacting with Siri, you will be able to essentially keep a chat window open. This works on your Mac and I think on the iPad as well, where you essentially have a floating window that you can expand to have a more in-depth conversation on a particular topic. So, for example, if you wanted to do something with data that you had it retrieve, you’ll be able to do that. Essentially, what we’re getting now is the Siri that was promised almost two years ago. It’s more conversational. It’s better with customization options. But the customization options, because you can speed up or slow down Siri, and you can also change, I’m not really sure, sort of like its personality a bit. I don’t really, again, I haven’t had a chance to play with the betas or anything. But there’s essentially like just a slider where you can change those things. But that’s only on the iPhone 17 Pro, the iPhone Air, a Mac with an M3 chip or newer, or one of the very latest iPads, etc. You’ll still get Siri AI features. They just, you won’t have the even more improved voice, And you’ll be missing a few of the on-device processing features in the new OS, because it requires a more complicated AI model to run. So you need better hardware for that. But it does look rather interesting. You know, they were able to talk with Siri normally and get it to do things both on your device. And with data that you’ve had access to. So, for example, you know, it’ll be able to look at your calendar and understand that, oh, you have an upcoming doctor’s appointment. And then you can say, like, you know, I have a doctor’s appointment on Tuesday and I wanted to know, you know, where can I go nearby that, you know, has some good food? And then, you know, can you, you know, they did this whole thing where they were planning a party and they made a menu of like recipes to make for the party. So it’ll be more capable than it’s ever been. And that is apparently true even on the older iPhones, et cetera. It just won’t be quite as outstanding with the on-device processing. It will still send requests when necessary into the private compute cloud so that essentially not even Apple knows what you’ve asked Siri. It’s just using more complicated models that are capable to run on your local device. But it will keep your information safe and secure so that nobody’s watching what you do or say. And that was pretty much it for the tentpole features that they discussed. But I will pull out one thing that I thought was kind of interesting. There’s a feature called call context that wasn’t in the keynote, but depending on how this works, I think this would actually be kind of useful. Using only local AI, when you call a business, your phone will try to automatically pull up some relevant information right in front of you. So you’ll still be able to, you know, manage your phone call features and, you know, dial numbers or do whatever you want to do. but on the main screen there will be information that may be relevant to that particular call. So, for example, if you call your doctor, if the local Siri AI can see in your email that there’s, let’s say, a bill that came in from that doctor, it might display the information about that bill so that you don’t have to go switching to another app to try to find that data. If you call an airline, it will bring up the confirmation number and the details for your flight that you may need to reference while you’re on the phone. Again, I haven’t been able to play with this, but it looks very interesting. Again, so that you don’t have to, because, you know, how many times have, you know, you made a call and then all of a sudden the person on the other end of the line asks you something that requires you to go hurry up, go to your email, look, you know, do a search for something and then hope you can find it quickly enough. So hopefully if this is smart enough, it could be a real sort of game changer for that sort of thing. Also worth noting, if this is something that bothered you about Tahoe, they didn’t mention it, but they are removing the icons from all menu items in macOS. So you may remember in Tahoe, they added like icons for almost every menu item. And they looked okay, but like honestly, the icons didn’t always make sense. And it’s been counter to the way that macOS has always worked. And a lot of people were cranky about that. So they’ve gone ahead and removed the icons from the menu items. And then if you’re interested in all the various new features that are available, take a look at the PDF that I sent, because it’s got 262, quote-unquote, listed new features. like I said a lot of them are relatively minor but again like like Snow Leopard it’s just there’s a lot of little pain points that you don’t realize you’re suffering from until they get fixed and you’re like oh you know that’s been a problem for years and I’ve always worked around it and now you don’t have to hopefully so I’m looking forward to the new release but like I said unfortunately it won’t be available on a lot of older devices. If I remember correctly,

Leopard was the buggy version and Snow Leopard took the time to fix the bugs. That’s what I said,

yeah. It’s a Snow Leopard-like release. They’re just focusing on sort of fixing bugs. They did bring in the AI features that they promised two years ago because they’re done. They were supposed to be with us two years ago uh but outside of that uh you know they didn’t make a whole bunch of like massive new changes they just fixed problems which is why things like they sped all of this what they said was they sped everything up we’ll see what that actually means when you put it to use but it does mean that somebody went through the code with fine-tooth comb trying to get rid of the cruft, the old stuff maybe that was slowing things down. I know they completely re-architected the Spotlight feature. So it’s still called Spotlight. It’s just faster. And Spotlight will also integrate Siri AI so that you can ask Siri or type to Siri to have it do something based on whatever it is you’re searching for. So, you know, hey, I’m all for that if that’s true. Time will tell, but initial, you know, I’ve read a couple of quick things where people have sort of played around with the initial beta. So far, what people have seen, they seem pretty happy with the changes, but time will tell. It’s very early beta. There are features that are still not accessible. So, you know, we’ll just have to wait and see. As always, the operating systems will be released in the fall, usually just before the new iPhone comes out, or maybe a week before. But if you’re really interested and you have a supported device, the public betas will be available starting in July. And that pretty much covers that particular question. So does anyone else have any other questions they would like to ask? Hopefully so, or this is going to be a short meeting.

How about if I just quick follow up? I actually tried to listen to part of a State of the Union presentation one time, and I thought it was pretty much above my head. Is that something anybody on here actually heard anything that was interesting to share from?

um so the state of the union um i have listened to it i haven’t finished watching the whole thing okay but it is really focused on developers uh because that’s primarily what wwdc is so it gets into the weeds like the behind the scenes stuff now the thing the thing that is not going to be terribly interesting at first launch. But that will probably become interesting is they’ve made improvements to App Intents and App Schemas, such that, so that’s a feature that allows Siri AI and Apple Intelligence to interact with the features that are available in the apps that you have installed. And that will make it easier for us to do things in those apps without having to manually click through stuff and do it yourself. Like I said, that is not something that there’s a lot of examples of right now, because some of these app intents and app schemas have been a thing in a limited context, but the new improvements, again, are only in the betas. So it will be a little bit of time before we’ll see. But if developers start using those features, it will make Siri and Apple Intelligence much better.

So what you’re saying is it has more agentic AI features?

Sorry, I accidentally triggered Siri.

So what you’re saying is that it has more agentic AI features.

Yes. Now, the word agentic did appear in the keynote once, and they did not talk about it in that context. And I think it’s really because Apple’s focus on AI features is different than most companies. Apple’s been more about how to make AI integrate with the operating systems and the things that you want to do. So making it a tool rather than a destination, which things like OpenAI, you know, perplexity, etc. They’re all about, oh, come, you know, live your life in our chatbot and we’ll do everything for you. And Apple’s not like that. They don’t want you to live inside AI and have AI do all the things. They want you to live your life, and they want to, where it makes sense, help you get things you want to do done without forcing the feature line. So I think that’s honestly a better approach. But of course, the companies like Meta, et cetera, that are spending all the money on those data centers have to justify their billions and billions of dollars of capital expenditure. So they want you to live inside an AI chatbot. And like I said, you know, it’s taken Apple longer to get here. But I feel like it will end up, at the end of the day, being a more useful way to interact with AI such that it doesn’t feel like, oh, I’m interacting with AI right now. It’s just sort of like, I want to get something done. I asked my phone and then, you know, it helps me do what I want to do and gets out of the way when I don’t want to deal with that. But, you know, time will tell. So, okay. Does anyone else have any other questions?

Is anyone thinking about running the public beta or for that matter, anything earlier than the

public beta on this or are we all waiting i’m waiting probably run the public beta but not right away uh just because i want to see what it is before it gets released publicly um because i’d like to be able to do you know a presentation on the os so i’d like to live with it a bit um which i wouldn’t normally suggest that people do unless you have a device where like i don’t really you know, it’s not my daily driver and I just want to play around with the OS, then yeah, go ahead and install the beta. But betas are betas. And most of the time Apple’s betas are fairly, you know, solid, but there are some times when, when features just don’t work and, you know, you’re sort of stuck. So yeah, just be careful running the betas. But if you have a device you feel you can. You know, it is nice to get a sort of early sneak peek, but I will say this, unless you have, you know, several devices so that you can upgrade all of them to the public beta, you’re not going to get the fully rounded experience of the Golden Gate releases until, you know, you can upgrade all of your devices so they all work the same way. Okay. All right.

I have a question. Go ahead. Okay. Unsupported devices, I have quite a few. It’s a point of no sense keeping them. Are there any place to give them away or anything? Or is it something should just be destroyed?

So if they’re really, really old, Apple will take almost any device from any manufacturer, as long as it’s tech-related, they’re not going to take your toaster. But they will take almost any phone, any computer, any, you know, so even if, you know, even if it’s not something you can sell, they will break it down so that they can properly recycle it. They will make sure that your data is destroyed so that, again, you know, nobody will get access to it. And that’s one of the things, like, you can trust Apple that they’re not going to try to, you know, exploit anything on a device that you send them.

So the local township recycling is questionable?

Well, here’s the thing. It’s not, it depends on your local recycling, because a lot of local, like town recycling programs may or may not take, you know, electronic devices that may be larger than a phone, etc. You have to find out from them if they do. And then you also need to find out what the requirements they have. Like they may tell you, you know, you have to wipe the device and maybe, you know, remove the battery if it’s possible. Just check with your local.

Well, it sounds like the Apple store is a way to go.

Yes. If you have one nearby. And by the way, you don’t even have to go to an Apple store. They will mail you a mailer. And then you can mail the item to them and they will recycle it that way. Apple does have a trade-in program, but they generally only support fairly recent devices. So if you have something really old. Now, to be fair, if you’re willing to go on eBay, if you have an older device, there are people out there who really want those, you know, like an old classic Mac, you know, or like an early iPad and stuff like that. They may or may not use it for the device. They may be using it for parts, but you can get some money. You’ll get more money on eBay than you would selling it to a company that accepts old tech devices. Because I’ve tried to sell like really old Apple watches and stuff. And they’re like, all right, we’ll give you $3.50 for it. You know, like, I mean, okay, but, you know, if you go on eBay, you might get, you know, $25, $30 for it. But then you have to also deal with the hassle of selling it on eBay.

Well, I’m not so interested in selling it. I’ll either give it a donation that would help somebody or I’ll destroy it by Apple.

Right. That’s the way I’ll go. And if there’s, like, for example, I will point this out. If you have old hard drives that have, you know, have had data on them, the safest way to get rid of them is to have them destroyed. And there are services out there online that will ship you a secure container where you can put in a bunch of hard drives, you know, from your old machines, if you want to make sure that your data doesn’t end up in the wrong hands. And then you basically seal the device with a special, you seal the box with a special sort of like security seal. So it can’t be opened easily by anyone who is not the place that’s going to destroy it. And they will provide you proof that they destroyed your items without, you know, doing anything. Can you just draw a hole through it? Usually what they do is they have like a giant shredder. And it turns the hard drive into pulp. You know, just little metal shreds.

Well, why don’t you do that yourself? Just draw a hole through it.

Sure, sure, you can do that. But then, you know what I’m saying? Like, there’s always, you know, if you’re really concerned that, you know, because you draw a hole through it, that’ll definitely do a good job. But I will say this. if someone really wants your data even that won’t stop well they would have to want my data and i don’t think so yeah yeah right uh you know unless you are dealing with like governmental secrets or something they’re not going to go to a place that is capable of you know putting the the drive in a clean room and accessing the platters that way really no yeah so um so yeah that’s good for just basic stuff but so there definitely are options um in terms of recycling like i said usually just sending it back to apple uh is the path of least resistance yeah and uh and they really do recycle stuff yeah i like that i like that yeah because some places uh i’ve heard story like horror stories of like they tell you they’re going to recycle your old stuff and then they don’t uh and then they resell it or they you know they end up using data off the devices it’s just yeah you do

need to be careful but i have another question good okay with password every time i click on it it says do you want to use the new version what’s the new version is there an advantage and why does

it keep asking me once i say yes um okay so is this on an older operating system no this is a silicon okay and two years old what version of the os is installed on the whatever the latest

i always keep it up to date so it’s whatever the latest one is okay so it’s using tahoe and it it

keeps asking you to update the no it doesn’t ask me update it says do you want to use the new version Well, okay. The only thing I can think of is if you have older devices that use Apple’s keychain to store passwords. Like older iPhones or an older Mac that can’t run Tahoe, etc. I believe in the more recent versions of Tahoe, they’ve made updates to the format of the data that is stored. in the passwords app and i think it will make it incompatible with older devices so you’ll lose you won’t your your data won’t get destroyed on your older devices but when you make things when you go on your newer devices and update passwords it won’t sync across to the older devices anymore and that may be why it’s asking you because it may be keeping the password data in an older format in order to make it so that you can sync across all the devices?

What would be the best answer to that? To stay with the old one and not bother with the new one?

Yeah. So, I mean, again, if you’re going to use those old devices and you don’t need the newer features in the password stack.

It’s not the old device. It’s the way they store it. Because I only do it on my Mac itself. It wouldn’t matter then.

Yeah, right. You know, because as far as Apple is concerned, any devices that are still linked, if you go into iCloud.

Oh, yeah, they’re linked.

You can see a list of your devices. Yeah. And, you know, honestly, like for a long time, I had like old VMs that were running macOS. I had old, like an old iPad that I still had. And I was using, but I wasn’t really using it for syncing or anything like that. But because that old iPad, it was an old iPad Mini 2, was in my account, Apple would always warn me like, hey, we’re moving on to a newer format.

All right.

Are you sure you want to do that?

Sounds like those old devices I don’t use, I really should take off my list of accounts.

Yeah, right. And you can go to the list and you can click on an item and be like, remove from your account. Yeah, I’ll do that. And of course that will remove it from, you know, like find my as well. So just make sure that you really don’t want it to appear in the list. Like if you’re not really using it, if you’re just keeping it in a drawer, just, you know, because you enjoy checking out older stuff periodically, then it doesn’t matter. You can remove it from your account. You can, you know, it’s not going to hurt anything.

Yeah, I agree. Good idea.

Yep. So yeah, like I said, I think that’s what it’s probably referring to. And so when it asks you that, you can say yes. Go ahead and, you know, use the new.

The new file will be saved in the new format. Yeah, yeah.

And it’ll give you access to the newer features that weren’t compatible with older versions of the passwords. Well, because the passwords app is a relatively recent, you know, addition. It used to be just you would go into Safari and look at your passwords there because it was considered to be part of the browser features. So that’s, you know, but it still used iCloud to synchronize your passwords to all your devices. So, yeah, that’s why it’s warning you. Okay. Does anyone else have any questions? All right. Well, I think we can call it a night then. I want to just remind everyone that we’ll be taking… Oh, and they’re gone. Alrighty. Yeah. Well, I sent it to email, so they’ll know. All right, Michael. Have a good night. I hope you find something soon.

Sooner or later, thanks.

Okay. Take care. Good night.

Good night.

That concludes tonight’s podcast. See you next month. ♪ ♪