macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

LoganDark

A few macOS betas ago, a bunch of sites started failing to play video for me in Safari. Disney+, Netflix, YouTube and some other sites will sit at a black screen for a few seconds and then give me an error. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes certain videos will reliably fail while others reliably work fine. I thought this was related to Safari's autoplay protections, but I tried giving permission to autoplay all videos and that doesn't seem to change anything. Not sure if that fits the definition of a Snow Leopard update. If so, Apple needs at least a few more Snow Leopard updates at this rate. I'd also like to see them fix the issue where Liquid Glass uses a downscaled background image even at the most transparent setting. (Except for Siri AI which they seem to have added a special exception for, exactly because the downscaling is super ugly)

troupo

> an understated update that in other years might have been called a “Snow Leopard release.” No. It wouldn't. Snow Leopard was two years in the making, and then took another few years to actually become the Snow Leopard people remember. Fixing some transparency and re-drawing a few icons is not a Snow Leopard release. Like, which features in this 150000-character blog post actually warrant the title of "Snow Leopard release"?

mikae1

When was the last time you felt excitement for a macOS release? Me? Snow Leopard. When I transitioned to Linux I rediscovered OS excitement. I'm on KDE Plasma now and every update has exciting features that serves my interests.

CodeWriter23

When are they gonna make "macOS South Central"?

nikanj

All of my stuff updated to the 27 versions today. During indoor cycling class, I kept getting health alerts on my watch about high heart rate while stationary. Despite currently having the very same apple watch tracking my indoor cycling workout. I guess Claude doesn’t take spinning classes

levl289

> I’m not a particularly big fan of generative AI. I do not use and have never used it at any stage of the research, outlining, or writing process for any article I’ve ever written, except for the times when I’m testing it so I can write about it. This is wild from a "tech" site. I used to read their articles fairly religiously, but this bent by their writers and commenters is really telling, and a signal to start looking elsewhere.

ProfessorLayton

"...Golden Gate needed a whopping 17GB more space on the M1 MacBook Air, thanks to a mandatory multi-gigabyte language model download that kicks in automatically the first time you connect a freshly restored Golden Gate Mac to the Internet." This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been. My phone is on iOS 26, and even with Apple Intelligence turned off, there's ~13GB made unusable. My phone ran out of space while recording a bike trip, and yet the model I have no use for remained.

MrVitaliy

Apple seems to be doing a lot better job at integrating LLMs into OS, than Microsoft.

Razengan

For me, macOS 27 was great for the first 3 betas, then it became horrible. And the release version still has some weird bugs, even iOS 27. It's as if their Claude credits ran out halfway through

muppetman

I've found today after going to MacOS27 (I skipped 26 fully) that Chrome extensions don't load properly. They're super, super slow. I've found one or two other bug reports of this from older Dev builds but that's it. Bizarre. Time to flip back to Safari I suppose.

glimshe

Will I get prompted to give Chrome permissions to the Local Network on every update? This is literally the one feature I'd like from Apple because I'm happy with everything else. The update looks cool, but nothing I actually want/need.

carlob

how to disable gen ai features https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250012366 it used to be one toggle

classictraffic

So happy they’ve finally added Ethernet status to the menu bar. It has always bugged me there wasn’t an easy way to quickly check if my Mac was using Ethernet or not

gushie

My macbook only has about 3GB of spare disk space currently, so I guess this isn't for me

ost-ing

If you don't want your mbp to run like garbage, then don't update to the newest version of obsolescenceOS.

therealmarv

Hmm, I remember when Ars Technica macOS reviews were the gold standard. This one isn't bad, but I miss having more in-depth information about the improvements. In my opinion, the details here complement the Ars Technica article nicely: https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-27-the-macstories-r...

rrjjww

Does it fix the hideous floating sidebar UI?

jbverschoor

Do we have proper dictation?

apatheticonion

Wake me up when Apple releases Linux for Macs

gorfian_robot

so I have to get a mac from mainland china to opt out? #Weird