macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

macOS 27 Golden Gate is framed as both a “Snow Leopard update” and a major leap for Apple Intelligence. Two years after Apple Intelligence’s initial launch, Apple is giving its generative AI features their first significant upgrade, along with a new version of Siri that the company had strongly implied would arrive in each of the last two macOS releases without ever announcing a release date. In Golden Gate, Apple Intelligence is unavoidable: the previous toggle to turn it off and delete the gigabytes of downloaded AI models is gone, and AI defines the release across marketing, features, supported chips, and disk usage.

Underneath that fanfare, the OS is getting the kind of update macOS users usually say they want. Golden Gate addresses the most irritating design sins of macOS 26 Tahoe, adds many incremental improvements, and promises under-the-hood fit-and-finish optimizations to make common tasks feel faster and more reliable. That makes for an occasionally jarring combination: big, impossible-to-ignore, impossible-to-disable AI changes wedded to an understated update that in other years might have been called a “Snow Leopard release.”

Golden Gate is the first macOS release since the mid-2000s not to run on any Intel Macs. Six years into 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, so the update now requires an Apple M1 chip or newer.

Supported hardware includes the 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, and the 2026 MacBook Neo. The reviewer tested on an M1 MacBook Air (16GB/1TB), a 15-inch M3 MacBook Air (24GB/512GB), and a MacBook Neo (8GB/512GB), giving a sense of how Golden Gate and future macOS releases treat Apple’s least-capable hardware. The good news is that any Apple Silicon Mac that isn’t falling apart should run Golden Gate mostly happily, and all supported Macs can run Apple Intelligence, which never ran on Intel hardware.

For Apple Intelligence itself, 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.” There is also an AFM 3 Core Advanced model, described as Apple’s ... — though the excerpt cuts off before providing further detail.