macOS 27 Public Beta
Apple today released the first public beta of macOS Golden Gate, expanding the macOS 27 beta test to non-developers. You can sign up to test the update on Apple’s beta website, and then download it by going to System Settings > General > Software Update and toggling on the macOS 27 beta.
The fact that there are more design changes in macOS than any of Apple’s other 27 updates speaks volumes about how broken many of the Tahoe design decisions were. Apple describes the design as “even more refined,” because in Apple marketing-speak, broken features are never remedied or fixed—past features are just improved. The truth is, Apple has rolled back numerous missteps and made changes to others to mitigate the issues they caused.
The Golden Gate developer beta has proven stable in my everyday use on an M5 MacBook Air and M5 Max MacBook Pro, which is notable since dev betas often have side effects like tanking battery life or causing hardware to run hotter than normal.
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Would I still prefer to go back to the flatter design of macOS Sequoia? Yes, unequivocally. But at least Liquid Glass is more tolerable and less distracting now.
Nowhere is the Snow Leopard of it all more apparent than in the hundreds of little changes made to improve the day-to-day use of your Mac. I’m not going to catalog them all here, but I’ve used Golden Gate on two different Macs at this point, and based on my experiences so far, the changes are meaningful.
This is the crazy Finder column view file selection dragging behavior I’m seeing in the latest Golden Gate developer beta.
With the release of the macOS 27 Golden Gate public beta, can we finally submit Mac apps built with Xcode 27?
Previously:
- Golden Gate Spotlight
- Apple Intelligence in appleOS 27
- macOS Touch
- AI-Generated Shortcuts
- Siri AI Announced
- Glow Leopard
- macOS 27 Golden Gate Announced
- Liquid Glass 27 Slider
- Liquid Glass 27 Icons
- Golden Gate Window Corners
- Golden Gate Sidebars and Toolbars
- Golden Gate Menu Icons
- appleOS 26 Public Betas
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That bug looks like consolidating behavior with how iOS handles selection for a future touch-enabled Mac.
> This is the crazy Finder column view file selection dragging behavior I'm seeing in the latest Golden Gate developer beta.
Probably b/c they're rewriting everything with gesture recognizers. Hope that gets fixed before release b/c I have enough NSBrowser hacks in my app already!
This all reminds me so much of living through Windows Vista. Jason Snell's quote especially.
Finally, our Windows 7 may be on the horizon.
And now that Dye is finally gone, maybe we can finally stop having "the biggest macOS redesign ever" every single year, each year worse than the last.
I'm sure it feels faster than Tahoe did, if reports of its sluggishness were true, but I'm surprised it feels faster than Sequoia did. Probably 75% optical illusion because of faster animations, but intangibly, this feels nice.
@bart If your analogy holds, that means Siri Copilot is coming soon. Note Snell's caption "Ask Siri has been welded onto the top of contextual menus. It feels wrong and seems needy."
@billyok I still notice sluggishness compared to Sequoia particularly in the menubar, how quickly menus open, etc. It's generally faster than Tahoe, but slower than Sequoia on my MacBook Air M1.
Anyone calling this release Snow Leopard (Voorhees) is shilling hard. Tahoe is so broken reverting half of its disasters still leaves you with a bag of ass, but at least there's other improvements that make installing it a reasonable tradeoff. Snow Leopard was not that tradeoff.
Sequoia is turning out to be the modern Snow Leopard. Widely compatible, reasonably modern and stable, and like Snow Leopard it is a release people intentionally stick with for a while.
I really wish a few of these commentators would step up and MORE LOUDLY lambast Apple for orphaning MILLIONS of Mac customers on (what is now OBVIOUSLY) a garbage macOS release. I get that part of the ability to be making these changes is jettisoning older code for an older platform… but… it just shows that Apple could have released something better a year ago… two years ago. Instead, folks with not-that-old Intel Macs got screwed over, stuck with Tahoe, an obviously half-assed, underbaked operating system with an awful, poorly conceived UI. Really… they got DOUBLE screwed because since Apple didn't bother to ever develop a TPM-shim for their T-security chipset, those Intel-based Mac users can't even run Windows 11 'supported' either (when their hardware would be otherwise fully supported). (Triply screwed for some of them who can't even run Sequoia with Open Core Legacy Patcher, even though the hardware is fully capable, similar to 'supported' hardware, because of that same T-securty chipset.)
Apple needs to be held accountable for their PR narratives… they either CARE about putting consumer electronics in landfills ALL the time, or they're full of it… it can't just be convenient to landfill millions of 27-inch 5K iMac panels because it benefits Apple and its Exec Team's insatiable greed.
landfill
I’m very sure Apple would much rather you hand your old computing devices back to them so they can recycle everything they possibly can out of your old computer, both for eco reasons and because processing recycled aluminum and gold and rare-earth metals and whatever they can extract out of it is cheaper than turning raw materials into what they need to build newer, better devices.
@Scott Yes, some sort of regulatory requirement requiring Apple to release the full sourcecode for any operating system or product, for which they are not providing active support.
I suspect you'd find High Sierra Rev.2026 would become a much-used product.
@Scott As a 2020 Intel iMac owner, +1m. OTOH, if you're willing to go down the broad path of evil and accept that you're behind Windows GAC, Windows 11 iOT LTSC will run on Intel Macs because the artificial limitations are taken away.
And this isn't a Snow Leopard-type release, because VoiceOver is still broken. I'm still going to need VMware Fusion, which won't run because Apple broke it for VoiceOver users. Or Parallels, with a third-party OCR utility, because it's not a proper AppKit app. I really do want to move on from Sonoma, but that's not happening until I've got a path forward for virtualisation of Windows or headed Linux.
