macOS 27 shows when your Mac was made, and iOS 27 lets you set how expressive Siri soundsmacOS 27 shows when your Mac was made, and iOS 27 lets you set how expressive Siri sounds

macOS 27 shows the date a Mac was manufactured, in a place Apple has not pointed anyone to.

According to MacRumors, which credits a forum member for the find, the date appears at the bottom of the Regulatory Certification window: open System Settings, General, About, and click the Regulatory Certification link beneath the System Report button. A Date of Manufacture field, giving a month and year, sits at the foot of the certificate. iDownloadBlog confirmed it on two of its own Macs and found the field absent on a Mac still running macOS 26. Apple's own Mac User Guide still describes the Regulatory Certification link as showing certification information and does not mention a date.

What does the manufacture date actually measure?

Probably the logic board, not the whole Mac. Both outlets report a forum member whose MacBook was bought in November 2024 and showed a date of February 2025, after a warranty repair replaced the logic board in April 2025. That points to the date being stored on the board. For a Mac that has never been repaired, it should be close to when the machine was assembled.

The reason anyone wants this is that the old method stopped working. Until 2021, a Mac's serial number encoded where and when it was made. Apple then moved to randomised serial numbers, which carry neither, and MacRumors notes that this left newer Macs with no simple way to tell their age.

Siri's voice gets an Expressivity slider

The second change is to Siri. Apple's support page on Siri's speaking rate, updated on 14 September, says that with Siri AI, which is in beta, Expressive Voices adds two sliders under Settings, Siri, Voice: Pace for speed, and Expressivity for the rest of the voice's character. Apple says Siri AI needs iOS 27 and a supported language and region. For anyone without Siri AI, speaking rate is still under Settings, Accessibility, Siri.

9to5Mac reported during the beta that each slider has five levels, and that the controls had spread from two new American voices to every American voice and the existing British ones. iDownloadBlog lists six accents in the new Voice menu: American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish and South African.

Which devices get the expressive Siri voice?

Apple's support page does not give a hardware list, and the outlets that do disagree in detail. 9to5Mac said in August that the voices need a newer on-device model, naming iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone Air, M4 iPad Pro and Macs with M3 or later and at least 12GB of memory. iDownloadBlog's list adds iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone Duo, any M4 or later iPad with 12GB and Apple Vision Pro with M5, and says the common thread is at least 12GB of memory. The iPhone 17, with 8GB, is not on either list. Until Apple publishes its own list, the 12GB threshold is the most useful rule.

Our take

These are two small changes, and they have one thing in common: neither appears in any Apple announcement, and both were found by users. That says something about how much ships in a major release that Apple never mentions. The manufacture date in particular is genuinely useful for anyone buying a used Mac, where age matters for battery wear and for how many more years of macOS updates the machine can expect. A seller's word was the only evidence before.

The logic board caveat matters for exactly that buyer, though. A date that is newer than expected may mean a repair rather than a lie, and a repaired board is not necessarily a bad sign. What the field cannot do is tell you the model year, so it complements the About window rather than replacing it. We would also like Apple to say what the field is, and whether it will appear anywhere more obvious.

The Siri sliders are a different kind of change. APPDOOK's reading is that Expressivity is the first Siri setting that depends on memory rather than on the chip generation or the language, which is why a current iPhone 17 cannot use it. That is the same division we described when Siri AI launched in English on only some of the phones people own, and it widens with every on-device model Apple adds. Owners of 8GB devices are going to keep meeting features like this one, small and pleasant and not for them.