macOS 27 Golden Gate Adds Touch APIs for Click, Scroll, Menu, and Pinch Zoom Gestures

Apple’s macOS 27 Golden Gate beta has introduced new APIs for tactile interactions, including the ability for developers to distinguish a touch from a classic mouse click and adapt application behavior accordingly.

“Apple Intelligence and Siri AI have sucked most of the oxygen out of the room at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this year—understandable, maybe, given that the AI-powered Siri delays are all anyone has wanted to ask any Apple executive about for the last two years”

Ars Technica

In Apple’s documentation, the company describes gestures where touching the screen equals a click, sliding a finger scrolls content, a long press opens a contextual menu, and a two-finger pinch zooms.

Ars Technica

The same documentation also says some APIs can detect when a compatible touchscreen is connected, and the article notes that this is not limited to Sidecar.

Developers on forums have also observed that Liquid Glass elements in macOS 27 react differently when used via a touchscreen, with buttons stretching more, lighting effects becoming more pronounced, and animations resembling iOS.

In Podcasts, the toolbar is described as producing a very marked lighting effect when touched, while the Calculator app is said to show stretching animations close to those seen on iPhone or iPad.

With macOS 27 Golden Gate, Apple ends support for AFP in the first beta, making it impossible to connect to shared volumes over AFP.

The MacGeneration article frames AFP as a very old protocol that was used by classic Mac OS and later by Mac OS X, but notes that from OS X Mavericks (10.9) Apple began prioritizing Microsoft’s SMB.

Gearnews

It adds that even where AFP still exists in macOS Tahoe, it is not accepted for backups unless a backup already existed before migration, while macOS 27 Golden Gate “ça ne fonctionne tout simplement plus.”

The article says the change becomes a problem for older devices including Apple Time Capsule and some older NAS, and it notes that in some cases only AFP for Macs and the first version of SMB are supported, with both protocols no longer accepted.

It also says solutions exist to add SMB support for Time Capsule backups, but they require modifications and installing open-source software, which it describes as not trivial.

Apple announced at WWDC 2026 that macOS 27 Golden Gate, arriving in September 2026, starts the final countdown for Rosetta 2, which largely ends with macOS 28 in fall 2027.

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iPhoneSoft

Gearnews says Rosetta 2 works fully through macOS 27, but with macOS 28, Intel-only plugins stop working, and it warns that this matters for music producers whose plugins have not been updated to run natively on Apple Silicon.

The article cites a community-tracked database stating that over 18,800 Intel-only Mac apps are still in circulation, and it adds that many of those are audio plugins.

It also describes a specific deadline detail: macOS 27 Golden Gate automatically uninstalls Rosetta 2 if it was installed under macOS 26 Tahoe, requiring manual reinstall after upgrading.

For mitigation, Gearnews recommends scanning plugins with Rosetta Check across AU, VST3, AAX, and CLAP formats to find what’s at risk, and it says the system alerts in macOS 26.4 and 26.5 already warn every time an affected app is opened.