Apple’s Spotlight upgrades look like a power-user dream

This year’s WWDC is shaping up to be surprisingly focused on power users. There are lots of new personalization ideas, plenty of new ways to move things around on your device, and some new ways to get things done. But Mac power users in particular are going to really fall for two things: the new Spotlight, and the new Shortcuts.

In MacOS Tahoe, Spotlight, the universal search and launcher feature you open with CMD-Space, can now do more than just open stuff. It can do stuff. Apps can provide access for Spotlight to execute all kinds of actions, from playing music and podcasts to creating notes or adding to files. You can find actions with search or with short keyboard shortcuts — on stage at WWDC, Apple’s Craig Federighi demonstrated using “sm” to quickly send a message.

Beyond that, it sounds a bit like Apple wants to make Spotlight the go-to way to access anything on your device. You’ll be able to search through both the things on your device and the things in your cloud storage, with lots of filtering options; there’s even a browsing view that looks a bit like the App Library on an iPhone or iPad. (Spotlight can also search all the apps on those devices, too, if you have mirroring set up.) If you’re in an app, you can open Spotlight and use it to search through all the menu options in the app.

True power users won’t be blown away by these features, because they’ve been using them for years. Apps like Raycast and Alfred have been popular for years, and have long offered this kind of simple navigation and shortcut access. Once you get used to one of these tools, there’s simply no going back. Now Apple’s trying to ship a slightly more mainstream version to Mac users everywhere. (The folks behind Alfred and Raycast will, uh, not be thrilled by today’s announcement.)

Apple Intelligence is also potentially making Shortcuts better. With MacOS Tahoe, you’ll be able to access various AI models through the app — including ChatGPT — to accomplish whatever you’re trying to do automatically. More exciting: you can now set Shortcuts to run automatically on the Mac, either at a specific time of day or when you do something specific. (I’m already imagining the one I’ll set up to turn on my lights, change sound settings, and close the blinds, every time I open my app for recording podcasts.) Shortcuts is still too complicated for many users, but it’ll be able to do much more for those who do the work.

In recent years it has often felt like longtime Mac users were being left behind, as Apple looked for ways to hook new users and integrate the glitzy new technology of the moment. It’s nice to see Apple going deep on a feature its most dedicated users use all the time.