It's both a "Snow Leopard update" and a major leap for Apple Intelligence.
It's both a "Snow Leopard update" and a major leap for Apple Intelligence.
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 ."
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:
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.
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:
(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.
Supposing you own an Intel Mac you'd like to keep using, your options are dwindling.
Reporting synthesized and verified under Nexvoro.tech editorial guidelines. Full primary records referenced via Ars Technica.
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