Accidental Tech Podcast Unpacks Early macOS 27 Details, a Siri Waitlist Workaround and Touch ID for Admin Tasks

The 696th episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast was a grab bag of early Apple platform details, and much of it focused on small changes that tend to matter most in everyday use.

The most practical item may be that Touch ID can now authorize administrator actions on the Mac, sparing users from typing a password for elevated tasks. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith also shared a terminal command that reportedly skips the waitlist for Apple's enhanced Siri features by flipping a feature flag. The hosts pointed to a related change in Apple's documentation as well. Anyone tempted to try the command should treat it as an unofficial workaround that could stop working in any update.

On the design side, the show walked through a long list of tweaks. A Liquid Glass slider appears as part of the Golden Gate onboarding flow, corner radius differences were illustrated side by side, and several Finder and general icons changed. macOS is getting pull-to-refresh, Troughton-Smith spotted changes to NSToolbar, and the iPhone Mirroring window can now be resized. On iPadOS, the menu now aligns to the leading edge, and the Siri pull-down animation in iOS 27 drew attention as well.

The hosts also covered Spotlight indexing for the new version, an update to the Passwords app, and the touch-enabled Macs that the show says are on the way. For more context on Apple's new Siri AI features, they pointed listeners to a review by Stephen Robles and a write-up from Ars Technica. Hardware compatibility lists for watchOS and tvOS came up too.

The episode closed with a members-only ATP Overtime segment on the WWDC 2026 platforms State of the Union.