Apple released the macOS 26 Tahoe public beta today, alongside the public betas for iOS, iPadOS, and other operating systems.

The headliner this year is the new Liquid Glass aesthetic that Apple is introducing across its entire product lineup this year, and aside from that, there's nothing coming to the Mac that feels quite as significant as the iPad's new multi-window multitasking interface.

But macOS remains Apple's most powerful, most flexible, and most power-user-friendly operating system, and per usual, there are a few new things coming in other than the big headliners. Here are a handful of under-the-hood and lesser-publicized things coming in Tahoe, both for those who install the public beta this summer and who install the final version of the update in the fall.

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On Tuesday, software engineer Doug Brown published his discovery of how to trigger a long-known but previously inaccessible Easter egg in the Power Mac G3's ROM: a hidden photo of the development team that nobody could figure out how to display for 27 years. While Pierre Dandumont first documented the JPEG image itself in 2014, the method to view it on the computer remained a mystery until Brown's reverse engineering work revealed that users must format a RAM disk with the text "secret ROM image."

Brown stumbled upon the image while using a hex editor tool called Hex Fiend with Eric Harmon's Mac ROM template to explore the resources stored in the beige Power Mac G3's ROM. The ROM appeared in desktop, minitower, and all-in-one G3 models from 1997 through 1999.

"While I was browsing through the ROM, two things caught my eye," Brown wrote. He found both the HPOE resource containing the JPEG image of team members and a suspicious set of Pascal strings in the PowerPC-native SCSI Manager 4.3 code that included ".Edisk," "secret ROM image," and "The Team."

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On Tuesday, classic computer collector Joe Strosnider announced the availability of a new 3D-printer filament that replicates the iconic "Platinum" color scheme used in classic Macintosh computers from the late 1980s through the 1990s. The PLA filament (PLA is short for polylactic acid) allows hobbyists to 3D-print nostalgic novelties, replacement parts, and accessories that match the original color of vintage Apple computers.

Hobbyists commonly feed this type of filament into commercial desktop 3D printers, which heat the plastic and extrude it in a computer-controlled way to fabricate new plastic parts.

The Platinum color, which Apple used in its desktop and portable computer lines starting with the Apple IIgs in 1986, has become synonymous with a distinctive era of classic Macintosh aesthetic. Over time, original Macintosh plastics have become brittle and discolored with age, so matching the "original" color can be a somewhat challenging and subjective experience.

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My experience with Apple’s Magic Keyboard for the Mac has been a love-hate situation, at best. It is slim, sleek, offers a fantastic scissor-switch, and serves the Touch ID convenience. What’s not to love?  Well, for starters, the asking price is a steep $200, which is too much for a non-mechanical keyboard. There is no […]

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