macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica review

stay gold It’s both a “Snow Leopard update” and a major leap for Apple Intelligence. Credit: Apple Credit: Apple Apple Intelligence is back, baby! That’s right: Two years after its initial launch, Apple is giving its generative AI features their first significant upgrade, along with a new version of Siri that the company has been strongly insinuating would be a part of each of the last two macOS releases, without ever actually announcing a release date. Generative AI is unavoidable if you install macOS 27 Golden Gate. I’m being very literal: There used to be a toggle you could hit if you wanted to turn off Apple Intelligence and delete the gigabytes’ worth of AI models it would download to your disk, and now there isn’t. Apple Intelligence defines the Golden Gate release, in everything from its marketing to its features to the chips it runs on to the amount of space it takes on your disk. Ready or not, here it is. But if you can manage to look past that fanfare somehow, the operating system underneath Apple Intelligence is getting the kind of update that macOS users usually proclaim to like. Golden Gate addresses the most irritating of macOS 26 Tahoe’s design sins, adds a big pile of incremental improvements, and promises a bunch of under-the-hood fit-and-finish optimizations to make common tasks feel just a little faster and more reliable than before. This makes for a combination that is occasionally jarring: big, hard-to-ignore and impossible-to-disable AI changes wedded to an understated update that in other years might have been called a “Snow Leopard release.” Table of Contents System requirements: Farewell to Intel The Golden Gate update is the first macOS release since the mid-2000s not to run on any Intel Macs. Six years after the beginning of the Apple Silicon era, Apple has dropped support for the last handful of 2019 and 2020-era Intel Macs that could officially run macOS 26 Tahoe. That means that the Golden Gate update requires an Apple M1 chip or better/newer, a list of hardware that includes the following: 2020 M1 MacBook Air or newer 2020 M1 MacBook Pro or newer 2020 M1 Mac mini or newer 2021 M1 iMac or newer 2023 Mac Pro Any Mac Studio 2026 MacBook Neo My primary testing hardware for this review has included an M1 MacBook Air (16GB/1TB), a 15-inch M3 MacBook Air (24GB/512GB), and a MacBook Neo (8GB/512GB), which means I have a pretty good sense of how Golden Gate and future macOS releases will treat Apple’s least-capable hardware. The good news is that if you own any Apple Silicon Mac that isn’t falling apart, Golden Gate should run mostly happily. It also means all Macs support Apple Intelligence, which never ran on Intel-based hardware. Apple Intelligence requirements Golden Gate introduces a minor split between older Apple Silicon Macs and newer ones. Apple Intelligence in Golden Gate is powered by its AFM 3 Core model, which has been built “in collaboration with Google.” But there’s also an AFM 3 Core Advanced model, Apple’s “most powerful on-device model,” which has additional hardware requirements. To run AFM 3 Core Advanced, you need both of the following: An M3-family processor or newer At least 12GB of RAM (The RAM requirement is a bit odd—no Apple Silicon Mac has shipped with 12GB of RAM, though there are several iPhones and iPads that have shipped with that amount. Optimists can choose to believe that this means a MacBook Neo with an A19 Pro and 12GB of RAM will be released at some point during Golden Gate’s lifespan). If you have an M1 or M2 Mac with 16GB or more of RAM, you’re still unsupported. If you own an M3 Mac with 8GB of RAM, you’re still unsupported. All M4, M5, and M6-based Macs clear the bar. So far, the only features that require the more-capable model are more expressive voice capabilities for the new Siri and an improved voice-dictation feature. But I would expect to see the gap between older/less-capable Apple Silicon Macs and new ones grow, if and when Apple makes more changes to Apple Intelligence. What to do with an unsupported Mac The 2019 Mac Pro is one of the latter-day Intel Macs being dropped by Golden Gate. Credit: Samuel Axon The 2019 Mac Pro is one of the latter-day Intel Macs being dropped by Golden Gate. Credit: Samuel Axon Supposing you own an Intel Mac you’d like to keep using, your options are dwindling. If the Mac you’re using still officially supports macOS 15 Sequoia or macOS 26 Tahoe, the path of least resistance is to continue running those operating systems until their security and Safari updates stop in the fall of 2027 and 2028, respectively (assuming Apple sticks with its past practice). You won’t get most new features, and Apple doesn’t always patch every single security flaw in older OSes that it patches in the latest release. But you’ll still be officially supported, your system will continue to function, and you can just install stuff through Software Update without worrying about it too much. If your Mac is older than that, if it stops at 2023’s macOS 14 Sonoma or an older version, you have fewer options. You can keep running unsupported macOS versions—Google Chrome supports everything going back to macOS 13 Ventura, and Firefox will run on versions as old as macOS 10.15 Catalina, to give you a sense of how long you can keep a Mac running at a sort of minimum-viable level of functionality. At that point, though, you’re opening yourself up to a long list of security vulnerabilities. At one point, running newer versions of macOS on older hardware was possible through projects like the OpenCore Legacy Patcher, but that project has foundered as Apple has removed more Intel-native code from newer macOS versions. The project’s last official update was nearly a year ago, and it has never supported macOS Tahoe at a software level or the Apple T2 chip at a hardware level. You can get macOS 15 Sequoia running on mid-2010s-vintage Mac hardware if you like, but expect a hit-or-miss experience depending on your exact hardware. Running Windows 10 via Boot Camp is supported on most of these Macs, but its security updates are drying up. It’s possible to install Windows 11 while using the old Windows 10 drivers, but unsupported Windows 11 installs come with their own quirks. And I think it’s pretty safe to say that most people don’t buy Macs to run Windows on them. Linux is an option for some Macs, and it should generally run well enough on 2017-and-older models. But Macs with an Apple T2 chip use that coprocessor for a bunch of critical I/O functions, and support in Linux for those functions is hit or miss. Some special distros exist that aim to offer improved support for those Mac models, and the bleeding-edge-curious CachyOS provides support out of the box (with several prominent pre-install asterisks). But the energy that exists in the Linux-on-Mac community is understandably mostly focused on more forward-looking Apple Silicon support. My recommendation, due to how awful pricing has gotten thanks to the ongoing RAM and storage crisis, is that anyone with a Mac too old to run macOS 15 Sequoia should very strongly consider a hardware upgrade. That’s not just because of software support; Apple Silicon Macs are generally a huge step up in performance, battery life, and power efficiency. For older MacBook Air and MacBook owners, even the relatively underpowered MacBook Neo will feel like a decent step up in both speed and hardware build quality. If your hardware is genuinely still functional, it’s frustrating to have to replace it. But at this point, that Mac is at least seven or eight years old, and new hardware will be the easiest way to keep going for the next seven or eight years. Branding The evolution of macOS installer icons over the last 12 releases. Credit: Andrew Cunningham The evolution of macOS installer icons over the last 12 releases. Credit: Andrew Cunningham As someone who has been to California pretty much exclusively for work and for weddings, I’ve always tried to approach Apple’s California-themed macOS codenames as an opportunity to learn a little something about the areas and landmarks that Apple has used for inspiration. I have rarely, if ever, found any kind of verifiable thematic link between the features or stated goals of a release and the name it’s been given. But it’s been fun to try. Golden Gate is our second consecutive release named for a body of water, following a stretch of releases named for towns/regions (Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma, Sequoia) and another stretch named after things that are mostly rocks (Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina). Maybe naming the Liquid Glass releases of macOS for bodies of water was intentional and maybe it wasn’t—only Craig Federighi can say for sure. You might think that macOS 27 is named for the Golden Gate Bridge since it’s an iconic landmark and it factors into all the real-world desktop wallpaper videos in the operating system (there’s also, per usual, an “abstract color swirl” option, which in this release is gold that fades to black). Since opening to the public in 1937, this bridge has become synonymous with San Francisco and the Bay Area, the same way that the Empire State Building symbolizes New York City, or that sports hooligans symbolize Philadelphia. But that’s not right! Did you know that the Golden Gate Bridge is so named because it’s a bridge that spans a strait called the Golden Gate? And not because it’s a bridge that is sort of arguably golden-looking and loosely resembles a gate? It had never once occurred to me to check my assumptions about this until now. The name dates back at least as far as the 1840s, according to the memoirs of explorer and politician John Charles Frémont, which say that he recorded the name on a map of the area that he submitted to the US Senate in 1848. The name was appropriate, given the gold rush that began swelling the area’s population in that same year. Towers go up in the Golden Gate strait as the now-iconic