Preparing to Update to Golden Gate
As those new models start shipping on 22 September, the window for the first public release of Golden Gate has narrowed to 15-22 September, with greatest likelihood on the same day as the arrival of those new Macs.
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At the same time as the release of Golden Gate, we should get Tahoe 26.7 and Sequoia 15.8, but it looks increasingly likely that the final version of Sonoma has been 14.8.9, released on 6 August.
As we prepare to flee from the visual horrors of macOS Tahoe at last, this article is a reminder that it wasn’t the first major release of macOS that has had blatant bugs in its interface, although I suspect it may be unique in that those were intentional. While progress in Golden Gate has been limited, I hope you’ll find it rectifies some of the worst errors of Liquid Glass.
Many Macs will be left behind, as Golden Gate drops support for Intel.
Normally, I update around January. With Tahoe I waited until July. This time, I’m considering updating to Golden Gate soon after its release. The downside is that Xcode 26 doesn’t run on Golden Gate, so I would have to drop support for many older macOS versions (about 3% of my customers’ Macs). But it seems like Apple’s going to force that soon, anyway, as one of the next Xcode 27 updates will likely drop support for Tahoe. I want to get off Xcode 26, both to use the newer SDK and because there are various debugging/testing things that don’t work properly.
I am working on a new app. Right now, I am targeting back to macOS Sequoia. I think that would be a good OS to target but becoming quite old with Golden Gate just around the corner. […] I wonder if I should just target macOS Golden Gate and focus testing on that.
Previously:
- Ending the Golden Era for Backward-Compatible Apps
- Mac Studio 2026
- Mac mini 2026
- macOS 27 Public Beta
- Glow Leopard
- Avoiding Tahoe
- Ending macOS Intel Support
- Waiting to Update to Big Sur
- Waiting to Update to Catalina
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Michael, Xcode 26 still functions on GG. You just have to launch it directly from the executable. But everything functions fine.
macOS Sequoia another year.
I have Golden Gate on my M1 Air for testing, but it's meh.
macOS Tahoe is such a bitchass release I wouldn't mind having a gap in macOS support just to never touch it again. Specifically, tell users to upgrade to macOS 15 or 27 and disparage Apple over it every chance I can.
Intel hardware at this point becomes a Linux distro.
@Léo That’s good to know in a pinch. I guess I just don’t like relying on such unsupported configurations. (Current issue that Core Data debug logging doesn’t work from tests, even with a supported config.)
Any guesses as to whether it’s better to install the latest version of Tahoe and then install Golden Gate, or is a direct upgrade from Sequoia to Golden Gate OK? I don’t plan on sticking around on Tahoe at all but if there are bugs, I’d bet Apple hasn’t tested upgrades skipping a major version much so I’m a bit wary.
Also, any thoughts on Golden Gate compared to Tahoe would be appreciated. Tahoe seems like one of the worst releases in recent years but I can’t stay on Sequoia forever. (There are some niceties I’m missing like older passwords being saved automatically in the Passwords app.)
