This is Technology Bytes, episode 121, for June 29, 2025. Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go. So I mentioned that I would be getting a number of episodes out of this update to the 26 version of all of the operating systems from Apple, and today is no exception. Today I want to talk about macOS 26, and specifically about what they’ve done with Spotlight. I think Spotlight has always been a useful tool in macOS.
You could use it as an app launcher, you could use it as a file finder, you could use it to do math, to do conversions, lots of ways that it could be used. And so in that, you’d think what could be done more, and that’s what Apple did.
They did more.
They made significant updates to the Spotlight and its ability in macOS. They’ve made it smarter, so they’ve implemented some of their machine learning, maybe you could call it Apple Intelligence, and trying to figure out where you’re at and what you’re doing, and allow you to do more with Spotlight. So there are a lot of actions that can be done.
So figuring out where you are in the system, Apple knows like you may be in an app like Pages, I think they showed that in the keynote, where you could activate Spotlight by hitting command space. You can change that, but that’s the default.
And then do a menu command that you’re unaware of, you think that’s what the application will do, and then it will highlight that for you and tell you how to use that function in the app that you’re using. And when this is officially released, there will be APIs that developers will have access to to be able to do that in their own apps as well.
As always, you could use it as an app launcher, but now when you pull it up, it looks at the things that you’ve done most recently and tries to figure out how to put things at the top so you don’t have to actually type anything to find the app you might want. That works pretty well.
I’ve been using it for a couple weeks now on a couple different computers, and it works fairly well as an app launcher, and it finds things quite quickly.
The other thing that it does is called quick keys, and you can set those up yourself, kind of like keyboard shortcuts in a way, but you could do things like SM, which will then send a message, and you can type it right there in the Spotlight bar, and you can send a message, you can send an email, you can create shortcuts, you can do all kinds of different things with your system, and then if there are things that you do on your own that you would like to develop, you can make quick key shortcuts for things that you want the system to do.
It makes the tool super useful, and then it also has the ability to let you run or create shortcuts, and these shortcuts can use Apple Intelligence, they can use the on-device Apple Intelligence, they can use the private compute cloud Apple Intelligence, and you can also ask it to use like ChatGPT if you need it to do more than maybe what you think Apple Intelligence has the ability to do, and all of those things are quite powerful and can be quite useful.
I haven’t used all of them to this point, but I’m sure over time I will start to get used to what is available through the Spotlight actions and make myself a little more productive in the environment that I use it in, so I am looking forward to doing that in the not-too-distant future. So maybe I buried the lead on this one because the next thing I want to talk about is the clipboard manager that Apple has built into the Spotlight functionality.
For a long time, I’ve listened to a number of different podcasters who say they would never set up a Mac without a clipboard manager, and I have never used one.
I don’t really, well, I guess I don’t have a lot of money to spend on stuff.
I spend it all on Apple gear, and then I don’t have anything to spend on software. I use almost all of the software I use as what Apple makes, and it’s good, and I can get all the things done that I need to get done.
So I have never looked at a clipboard manager or anything of that sort before, but now it’s built into the system, and I use my systems, I don’t know if differently than other people, but I’ve talked about it before.
So I’ve got a MacBook Air that sits to the left of an iMac, which then is in the center of my desk, and my iPad Pro sits to the right, and I use a single keyboard and mouse to run all three of those systems. I like doing that because each one has its own heartbeat, so to speak.
They don’t have to wait for the other one to get done with the action before I can start it on another one of the other devices.
So even though the Spotlight, I don’t think it’s available in iPad, uh-oh, I should have done my research, but it definitely is available on the Mac, and the macOS 26 Tahoe. And so then I was wondering, is it only for the device that the copy happens on, or is it part of the universal clipboard that is available to all the systems that you’re using with a single mouse and keyboard?
And to my enjoyment and surprise, maybe, and just the thoughtfulness of thinking it all the way through, that clipboard manager is available as a universal tool. So if I copy something off of my MacBook Air and I want to paste it into my iMac, that’s always been a possibility.
But now if I copy multiple things and I want to go back a few copies ago, then when I do the command space and activate the clipboard manager, it doesn’t matter where the copy action happened or where the paste action happened, I get all of the history in that universal clipboard setting, and so I can paste it wherever I want. So how does it work?
Well, I think it works pretty solid.
There have been times where I think I’ve copied things and then they don’t show up in the history, and most of the time those are the universal clipboard things that aren’t showing up.
So I think there’s still a little bit of polish that needs to go in.
There’s things that for some reason it doesn’t perform exactly the same all the time. And there’s also not a lot of description in the universal clipboard because I copy a lot of URLs because I use a number of different tools at work that are developed at my work for my work.
And so it just says you’ve copied something from the portal or you’ve copied something from the sales tool.
It doesn’t always tell you what it is that you’ve copied and it’s truncated even when it does.
So there is some guessing that goes along with that. But if you just highlight text and you do that, then that shows up and it’s fairly clear what you’re trying to copy.
But all in all, the clipboard, I mean, the spotlight functionality is greatly improved.
I use spotlight pretty regularly anyway, and now it’s just become that much more useful.
I need to start looking at shortcuts that I can develop to make my workload a little bit more productive, and I also need to look at maybe those quick key shortcuts that can do things. But I use Teams at work, and until it’s officially released and Teams is written for that, I don’t think it will work for that.
But I do send messages to my family when I’m at work, and so I can probably do some of that.
But for the most part, my work quick key things are probably going to have to wait until the official release because Microsoft won’t have anything released until then. Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com.
That’s M-E-A-R-I-G family dot com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
