For the novelist, surprise is a matter of verbal engineering and timing, to ensure the reader turns to the last page still locked in suspense. For the painter, everything is inevitably revealed in plain sight.

Yet the first time you see Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast (c 1635-1638) in the flesh, it’s a thorough surprise in its imagery, composition, colours, lighting and facture. Showing a relatively minor episode from the Old Testament book of Daniel, Rembrandt creates surprise using every trick in the book, even if you can’t quite recall the resolution of its story.*

If Apple’s Event last week surprised you, then it achieved its purpose. But as far as the release date of macOS Golden Gate goes, I had told you almost a year ago, in my forecast of 24 September 2025. The dates I gave there for Tahoe’s scheduled releases were:

• 26.0 – 15 September 2025, already known at the time
• 26.1 – 27 October 2025, actually 3 November
• 26.2 – 15 December 2025, actually 12 December
• 26.3 – 26 January 2026, actually 11 February
• 26.4 – 30 March 2026, actually 24 March
• 26.5 – 11 May 2026, actually 11 May
• 26.6 – 27 July 2026, actually 27 July
• 26.7 – 14 September 2026, actually 14 September, alongside Golden Gate 27.0.

There have been occasional exceptions to this predictability. In 2007, Mac OS X Leopard was delayed by six months for the release of the first iPhone in June. The Covid pandemic and the introduction of Apple silicon Macs delayed macOS 11-13 slightly, but since Sonoma in September 2023, release schedules have remained more consistent.

Neither are the new features and changes in Golden Gate secret. Apple devoted many hours demonstrating and explaining them in its presentations from 8 June at WWDC, and has since given them out in a series of public beta releases. Some years the three months of pre-release testing brings about significant changes, but as Tahoe’s testing phase demonstrated last year, that seldom results in any major change in direction, no matter how loud our howls of anguish might be, and many of the bugs reported then won’t be fixed for another update or two.

If it’s not the date or the features of a new version of macOS, where is the surprise? It’s what birders refer to as its jizz, or feel, qualities you can’t articulate clearly, but make the difference between success and everything less.

What in code might seem minor technical matters assume great importance once millions are using it every day. A little awkwardness in scroll bars, controls slightly too small to hit reliably, gratuitous icons in menus, indistinct app icons, all contribute to jizz. Workaday features like Time Machine and Spotlight local search that aren’t beta-tested too thoroughly become critical for many. Those and much else are the real determinants of the success of a new version of macOS, and they don’t become apparent until after its full release.

Most important in this first divergence from Intel Macs is whether our investment in Apple silicon Macs is paying off. Does Golden Gate feel more responsive now it’s flying solo? Setting aside AI features for the moment, if I were to use my Intel MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019 alongside my MacBook Pro 16-inch 2023 M3 Pro, does Golden Gate give the latter a different jizz?

That has little to do with benchmarks, or tests you can time or measure objectively. It has been clear from the first M1 Macs almost six years ago that their Geekbench and other scores open a new chapter in Mac performance. But experience has now told us they can still become sluggish and unresponsive when used in real life, just as our Intel Macs did.

Golden Gate should prove a point of departure, and we should see its first signs in its jizz, and whether that comes as a pleasant surprise.

The horrified infant in Gaetano Chierici’s A Scary State of Affairs has their eyes wide open, mouth at full stretch in a scream, arms raised, and legs trying to fend the invasive geese off. I hope those geese aren’t your surprise for tomorrow.

* Spoiler: as God had weighed him and found him wanting, Belshazzar was killed, and his kingdom passed to King Darius the Mede.