macOS 27 Golden Gate
Apple (release notes, security, enterprise, developer, full installer, IPSW):
Explore what’s new for macOS 27.
The page is designed in an annoying way that requires sideways scrolling, and there doesn’t seem to be a PDF list of the new features like in previous years.
See also:
There’s also a DEPRECATION NOTICE at the top of the
manpage that lists thediskutilreplacements forhdiutilsubcommands.
Fixed: launchd no longer supports loading launchd property list files with the quarantine extended attribute.
[Even] though a bootable backup is properly configured to boot, they aren’t showing up as choices in either the startup disk preference pane or the startup picker. (FB24210103, reported quite a while ago, Apple friends.)
Previously:
- Golden Gate Release Candidate
- Preparing to Update to Golden Gate
- macOS 27 Public Beta
- Glow Leopard
- macOS 27 Golden Gate Announced
- macOS Tahoe 26
Update (2026-09-17): See also: Hacker News.
Andrew Cunningham (Hacker News):
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.
[…]
More impressively, for apps that support it, the iPhone Mirroring window can now be resized dynamically while running apps. Apps will resize themselves to take up all the available space, and once the window is wide enough, you can even take advantage of multi-column iPad-style views for the apps that offer them.
[…]
For most Mac users, though, Golden Gate is a no-brainer update with few major downsides. It won’t hurt anything to wait until the 27.1 or 27.2 release if you’re already on macOS 15 Sequoia or macOS 26 Tahoe and you’re not in a hurry.
macOS Golden Gate: 10 Features to Try First
Did Virtualization under 27 get hit with the slow stick? Trying to run a Mac VM on my M1 Ultra and it feels basically unusable. Getting Intel flashbacks.
In System Settings Privacy & Security, the Accessibility pane has been renamed to Device Control and Data Access.
Have you been noticing that, starting with macOS 27, you have been consistently failing to SSH to a remote machine? Is it the case that the remote machine’s password ends with a shifted character?
There is a new setting: “Shift Return sends Meta Return” under Settings > Profiles > (profile) > Keyboard. This setting (enabled by default!) will cause a shift-return keypress to insert an ESC before the return is sent.
As part of testing macOS Golden Gate, it was discovered by myself and others that MDM enrollment does not appear to completely work.
Golden Gate broke
AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivilegessuch that spawned tasks no longer inherit PATH of the calling process[…]
After upgrading to macOS 27 Golden Gate, my beloved copy of 1Password 7 started crashing every time I unlocked it.
[…]
If you’re planning ahead, you can disable Watchtower from Settings before you upgrade to macOS 27, but if you’ve already upgraded, then you’ll need to disable it with the following terminal command[…]
Update (2026-09-21): Benjamin Mayo:
Ever since updating to Golden Gate, my Mac now periodically makes a scratchy paper alert sound. No idea from what.
Hopefully 1Password will upgrade v7 for OS 27 compatibility, but I can’t count on them fixing bugs in v7 — they’re pushing users to v8.
I found a ‘fix’ for this crash, but that command didn’t work (even after enabling Full Disk Access for Terminal so it could actually execute), and isn’t available on iPhone or iPad.
Golden Gate status: wow, the new menu extra/Control Center area is rough. Not just unpolished UI behaviors but multiple crashes. Hidden Bar is no longer functional and none of the replacements I found actually worked, while having about 100 features I don’t want.
System keyboard shortcuts also seem to be an area that weren’t well tested. My preferred screenshot shortcuts were ignored until I opened that section of System Settings, and some Siri thing created a conflict with Spotlight so I get both of them when I press ⇧⌘Space.
Previously:
Update (2026-09-23): Jesse Squires:
macOS golden gate is still shockingly terrible in unexpected ways.
I’m no math expert, but I’m pretty sure this doesn’t add up to anywhere near 16GB. I’ve only started seeing this dialog in the release build of macOS 27.0, despite running the betas all summer, so clearly there are some ghosts in this build
Okay… how do you
- make everything super huge like the text and pictures… while
- having way more empty space than you need AND STILL have to
- truncate your text labels?
8 of the 9 text labels are truncated.
Can we please have designers who know how to design for DESKTOP software and NOT magazines/print?
There are a surprising number of behavioral bugs in Golden Gate. It's not just a superficial update. Apple is basically breaking AppKit.
I reported a bug to Apple in May, found while building Alcove. Two OS releases later it still isn’t fixed. It has gotten worse with each one.
[…]
On the betas the whole window went blank after the Cmd-Tab: sidebar, content, detail pane, status bar, everything but the toolbar. On the 27.0 release it usually doesn’t wait for the Cmd-Tab. In 5 of 6 clean launches the window came up with only the toolbar drawn. Cmd-Tabbing away and back doesn’t fix it. It moves the sidebar’s first row up under the traffic-light buttons and leaves the rest of the window empty[…]
Golden Gate Finder bug:
If you start dragging a file, the mouse scroll wheel stops working.
I’m seeing a bug on Golden Gate where main menu item titles are not displayed if the item is added to the menu after launch. Examples: the Safari Develop menu and the Profile menus of Chrome and Firefox.
Update (2026-09-24): Avi Drissman:
It’s bizarre that hiding a main menu item would hold the space rather then shift things over.
Search on Golden Gate is twice as good.
Update (2026-09-25): Ric Ford:
Randy Singer emailed us about printer and scanner failures following macOS 27 installation. Fortunately, there’s a fix: reinstalling Apple’s deprecated and removed Rosetta 2 emulation code[…]
We’re also already recommending upgrading your Mac to Golden Gate. The new OS includes several important audio improvements, and as a result, Golden Gate provides the best experience when using our apps. Below, you’ll find details on key bug fixes Apple included in MacOS 27.
pdfu (via Jeff Johnson):
Hidden behind a feature flag, the System Settings app can now be resized in any direction. You can make the app window narrower than the default too, or adjust the sidebar to get even more space.
Update (2026-09-28): Matt:
Steve Jobs would fire the entire company and replace them with AI if he was alive to see this
Turns out, Backblaze is half busted on macOS 27 and there’s no fix yet. Have to launch /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzbmenu.app manually for now, it seems.
Update (2026-10-05): Karsten Kusche:
Kudos to 1Password for providing an update for version 7 on iOS and macOS to restore compatibility with this year’s operating systems!!
15 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
-- I agree with @Dave_Nanian. In fact, I was hoping a fix was available on his end. For now? My "workaround" is to KEEP with macOS 15 as long as possible, and if ABSOLUTELY needed, either use my backup MBP for only REQUIRED things. (SD! bootable backups still work there.) In the case of a total disaster, I have found that Erase and Migration Assistant will work with a bootable backup.
-- If he can see my comment (or anyone else who could teach me), I have a question regarding his post. Namely footnote #1. "... and then using bless --mount /Volumes/Backup-Volume --setBoot in Recovery’s Terminal. But don’t unless you really have to..." Why? Is this comparable to me - I never did this - telling someone in the 90s running windows that the console command FDISK stands for "fix disc"?
My bad for not proofreading my comment....
My workaround is keeping my main MBP on macOS 15 as long as possible, and using my MBP running macOS 27 RC in that state as long as possible. I plan to see is macOS 15.7.9 (or ..10 if available) running Xcode 12.3 can still submit to the App Store. It worked in August. That's a task for later this week.
Last comment, I promise!
Xcode 26.3, not 12.3. I have no clue why, but mentally I tell myself it's 12.3. LOL... at least I know why I hope someday to be running OS 27 (or maybe 28...) months everything. They got *that* right IMHO last year - consistent versioning. (Hiding head for the negative reaction to that.)
@Dave:
"Why? Is this comparable to me - I never did this - telling someone in the 90s running windows that the console command FDISK stands for "fix disc"?"
No. He's saying you can verify the backup volume is bootable by doing this, but you shouldn't unless you really need to. Blessing a disk tells Mac OS that it can boot from it.
What's up with the minimize/maximize window controls? They look weird with black borders on the sides.
Sigh. According to ArsTechnica’s review of macOS 27, there is no way to stop the jigabytes of Apple Intelligence models from taking up space on your Mac: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/macos-27-golden-gate-the-ars-technica-review/
It does say that it is downloaded after installation from the internet, and certain languages and regions don’t download it (EU, for example). So there’s hope you can block it maybe using Little Snitch or Lulu, or blocking that URL.
I saw this tidbit on the ArsTechnica forums: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/apple-releases-ios-27-macos-golden-gate-27-with-siri-ai-and-liquid-glass-refinements.1514782/post-44639764
>I set (on my iPhone) Siri to use New Zealand English and it is now complaining that because my localisation (UK) doesn't match, I can't use Apple Intelligence because they "require" that they're set to the same language.
>I have just checked on my Mac Mini and it's replicated this setting there, is also complaining that I can't use Apple Intelligence and has offloaded about 10GB from the storage that it was using the other day. It's still using 14GB, which is pretty gross, but it's better than nearly 30.
Apparently Mission Control is broken as hell in Golden Gate:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1whesx6/mission_control_in_27_golden_gate_is_a_mess/
And this was supposed to be a Snow Leopard release?
A "Snow Leopard" release would require Apple to have functional quality control. And a less aggressive release schedule.
Did they ever claim this release was supposed to have a specific focus on fixing bugs?
@Bri The "Snow Leopard" angle is from a few Apple media shills.
Apple markets Golden Shower as the Siri AI release.
Apple's big AI effort (licensing Gemini) arrives the same week AI companies start panicking over the bubble popping.
> macOS golden gate is still shockingly terrible in unexpected ways.
That's actually an improvement over what Tahoe does for me when I try to search System Settings, which is just... nothing. Nothing happens, regardless of what I type into the search field.
This is admittedly going into nitpicking territory now, but... seriously?
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1wlhoid/new_golden_gate_wallpaper_is_pixelated/
I had to check that out for myself, and unfortunately that poster is right! We went from Steve Jobs taking his own photos for Leopard wallpapers to this pixelated mess. Steve would be tearing his hair out if he saw those on the Retina Displays.
> pixelated mess
Best as I can tell, it's not so much "pixelated" as: it's a still frame from a video, and perhaps on top of that, that video may have been shot on an iPhone. So props to Apple for seriously dogfooding their camera tech, but also, that sensor is clearly not good enough to resolve some of the details.
> Steve Jobs taking his own photos for Leopard wallpapers
I don't know if I fully buy that Steve Jobs casually made a photo as high-quality as Grass Blades. Maybe it was heavily edited afterwards. Maybe he selected the subject, and then someone else shot it professionally. Or maybe he was, in fact, quietly a photography expert.
On an entirely different note, I'm glad(?) to see I'm not alone in some wild multi-display Mission Control (slash Dock, slash menu bar… not sure what the general term for this would be, and not sure how much of it is done in the Dock process any more) issues, such as "opening a window in full screen causes another screen to go all black" and "opening a menu on one display sometimes causes its contents to show on a different display" (to be fair, that one was in a beta and may have been resolved since, though I haven't received a response to my radar). _And_ I was greeted this morning to a kernel panic. :-)
Just wanted to post here for some more visibility: Apple appears to have gimped the `ifconfig` command: it now returns only a redacted hardware MAC address of `02:00:00:00:00:00` (unless run with "sudo"). Continuing the trend of obfuscation. Not sure what an evil program could do with my system's MAC address but apparently Apple wants to protect me from it.
The workaround I found is: `networksetup -getmacaddress en0` hopefully that will not get removed in 27.2…
It seems like at one point Apple stopped doing separate photographs for their nature wallpapers and started to just take stills from their dynamic wallpaper videos instead. Sometimes it's OK (Sequoia), other times it's clearly not as good as it could be with a dedicated photo (Golden Gate). Seriously, just look at those bridge cables and how they're smeared together!
I have mixed feelings on the other default (graphic) wallpaper; it's cool that it forms a 27, but I'm not a fan of iPhone and iPad also sharing the same wallpaper in the name of "synergy". To be honest, it's kind of bland compared to Tahoe's default graphic wallpaper which was also distinct from iPhone/iPad. In fact, I think Tahoe's got the best one since Tiger! Definitely a few steps up above the bland graphic defaults since Big Sur. Can't believe I'm praising Tahoe here!
This almost feels emblematic of their growing trend towards "one-size-fits-all" development where rather than developing best-use cases for each platform, they just go with a mediocre all-encompassing "good-enough" solution (e.g. SwiftUI).
(OK, NOW I'm done nitpicking about wallpapers, sorry.)
