At Apple’s WWDC 2025 event, the tech giant announced significant enhancements to Spotlight, the integral on-device search tool for macOS. These upgrades, part of the forthcoming macOS Tahoe release, expand Spotlight’s capabilities beyond traditional search, making it a powerful hub to perform hundreds of tasks directly within the tool. Users will now be able to execute a wide variety of actions instantly from Spotlight, such as writing emails, creating reminders, and playing podcasts without navigating to separate apps.
This major overhaul comes at a time when command-line chat interfaces like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are becoming more prominent and widely adopted by users for productivity purposes. With these changes, Apple positions Spotlight to align itself with the rising trend of streamlined, command-driven workflows, claiming that Spotlight will become the fastest and easiest method to access and handle content on Mac computers.
Visually, Spotlight has been entirely redesigned for clarity and speed. Search results—including apps, documents, clipboard history, and more—are consolidated into one unified list, intelligently ordered based on their relevance to the user’s current context and past habits.
Another significant new feature introduced is “quick keys,” short character strings that instantly trigger certain actions or open specific apps. For example, users can type “SM” to quickly send a message or “AR” to create a reminder. Users can even customize quick keys for their own specific workflows. Developers, too, will benefit from these updates through Apple’s App Intents API, which allows software creators to integrate their apps directly into Spotlight’s enhanced feature set.
During an on-stage demonstration, an Apple executive illustrated the ease with which Spotlight could compose and send an entire email, all without leaving the search interface. How widely these new functionalities will actually be adopted, however, remains uncertain.
Apple has further enhanced Spotlight by integrating Apple Intelligence, making the tool context-aware. This allows Spotlight to proactively suggest common or relevant actions based on the user’s habits and current tasks.
The Spotlight improvements were among several updates unveiled for macOS Tahoe at WWDC. Other notable introductions include a new device-integration feature providing live tracking from iPhone to Mac, as well as a distinct interface redesign that Apple describes as “liquid glass.”
