I turned off Siri on the Mac years ago and never looked back. Similarly, I found Apple Intelligence so fruitless I never engaged with it. But the new Siri AI coming to macOS 27 Golden Gate has at least got me slightly rethinking things.

Siri is better, but its limitations are much more obvious on a Mac than an iPhone. My first 24 hours with Siri AI on the Mac revealed that while it can launch apps, it can’t take actions inside them (not that Apple ever claimed it could). I then tried to see if vibe coding a couple Shortcuts could get me there instead. This isn’t a Siri AI feature, but it is a new part of Apple Intelligence.

So if Siri can’t help me run my benchmarks, maybe it can at least help me be a little faster in logging the data. In my normal workflow, I run each benchmark three times, taking screenshots as I go, and later average out the results before cataloging them in a spreadsheet. Apple’s WWDC keynote showed someone using Ask Siri in Spotlight to analyze data in local files. So I tried selecting batches of those screenshots in Finder and asking Siri to calculate the average scores for me. It worked pretty well most of the time.

But there are still kinks to be ironed out: it could get thrown off if I included too many different types of tests, especially if I mixed ones with synthetic score results (Geekbench, PugetBench, etc.) and time-based results (Blender render tests and our 4K video export test). And it sometimes got thrown off by the CPU rankings data that’s visible in Cinebench screenshots. Ideally, I’d be able to have Siri AI accurately calculate the 15 or so averages from my dozens of screenshots all at once— that would save me some serious time.

For now, Siri AI seems a lot more capable within Apple’s ecosystem than it is outside of it, even for apps and files that are already on my Mac but in non-Apple apps. When I asked Siri to find my pictures of cats or babies, it pulled up results from Apple’s Photos and Messages apps. This could be enough for plenty of people, but not for me.