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macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review
- LoganDark 18d agoA 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)
- agos 18d agoHey sorry to be the debugging guy in the comments, but maybe your network issues could be related to iCloud relay? I’ve had similar issues
- LoganDark 18d agoMaybe, but it's weird that it started across all these different sites after an OS update. Netflix finally stopped accusing me of not being in the "household", but trying to disable Private Relay hasn't been able to fix a video not playing.
- troupo 18d ago> 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"?
- lattalayta 18d agoI think people are referring to the speed improvements touted by Apple https://www.newegg.com/insider/ios-27-performance-boost-every-speed-and-design-change-apple-showed-at-wwdc-2026/ https://www.newegg.com/insider/ios-27-performance-boost-ever...
- TheAmazingRace 18d agoI imagine the author saw this release as "macOS Tahoe but not sucky" I liken it to Windows Vista and Windows 7. Although fundamentally similar operating systems under the hood, Windows 7 smoothed out Vista's kinks and brought forth additional polish.
- jerlam 18d agoI wouldn't mind if they (unofficially) adopted a tick-tock release cycle. New features on even years, refinement and under-the-hood changes on odd years.
- mikae1 18d agoWhen 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.
- Hamuko 18d agoMavericks maybe?
- arpinum 18d agoWhen Siracusa wrote the last review.
- cromka 18d agoIf only KDE actually paid attention to UX and maybe cared about the looks and consistency a bit more. I'm sorry for being blunt but their visual design people's have no taste...
- mikae1 18d agoThere's little margins and whitespace and this bothered me like hell before making the switch. It's funny, now I kind of like it. A lot is happening too. The latest Plasma had a very high degree of polish IMO. It's far more consistent than Windows 11, but you have to pick Qt/KDE software, not GTK/GNOME for that to be true. I always choose the more KDE native option.
- armadyl 18d agoSeriously KDE is so extremely ugly and dated looking compared to macOS, GNOME and even modern Windows. I don’t care about the 30 million configurable options if it looks like a total eyesore. You’d think they’d put some effort into a consistent style / UI framework. People hate on GNOME for its rigidity but it’s the one desktop actually trying somewhat to provide Linux with an environment that the average person (not an HN user) won’t immediately turn their nose up in disgust at.
- 17d ago
- CodeWriter23 18d agoWhen are they gonna make "macOS South Central"?
- Faaak 18d agoAt the rate we're going, it would be "macOS America"
- tetec1 18d agoDon't give him ideas...
- reaperducer 18d agoIt comes between macOS Fresno and macOS Calexico.
- apazzolini 18d agoDon't be a menace.
- CodeWriter23 17d agoDon't be a snob.
- Mystery-Machine 17d agomacOS Skid Row
- nikanj 18d agoAll 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
- Terretta 18d agoheart recovery is one of several headline new features they mention on first run (and in app ref info) will calibrate over time as often the case when Apple makes its move, their implementations -- while late compared to e.g. Garmin which has had them for years -- purport to be leading accuracy on these features among wearables
- levl289 18d ago> 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.
- rozal 18d ago[dead]
- marbletiles 18d agoWhat does it tell you? It gives me much more confidence in their output tbh. Reading generated text is unpleasant; feels like mediated and averaged-out humanity.
- timbaboon 18d agoThere is a lot more to tech than gen AI…
- edot 18d agoContinuing the quote gives more context, which I agree with: "The obviously AI-generated flyers that come home from school with my kid or that get circulated around neighborhood groups strike me as benign but deeply tacky; the kinds of AI-generated images that get passed around by politicians online don’t even have the benefit of being benign. More than anything, I’m just tired of seeing it everywhere, tired of being on the lookout for it, tired of it polluting every stream of information I have access to. Wasting time actively trying to avoid auto-generated slop is now a daily fixture of my life." Obviously, one should be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it, and much like any tool that can be misused, just because some malign actor (or dumb actor) uses it "wrong" doesn't mean you should also not use it.
- whateveracct 18d agoIt costs money, but I've been enjoying my Pangram subscription for this. Saves me slop on the internet and confirms whether or not my colleagues' words are what i'm reading or not.
- ProfessorLayton 18d ago"...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.
- rylando 18d agoSame. It feels pretty messed up to lose that much storage on a 256gb device.
- drop_star 18d agoYou can always buy more iCloud storage!!!
- NetOpWibby 18d agoServices! Customer sat!
- DrPhish 18d agoYes, the disrespect Apple/Google/MS has for their users (on equipment they have purchased!) is palpable. They seem to have a real sense of entitlement these days. It used to be universally accepted that losing or corrupting user data was a (if not THE) cardinal sin in development. In many ways we get what we tolerate, but the lack of viable alternatives in some spaces (esp cellphones and TVs) makes it very hard to hold the big players to any kind of account economically. At least no one is holding a gun to our heads to use MacOS or other proprietary systems on our desktops/laptops/servers for the most part.
- wronglebowski 18d ago17GB when a large majority of the devices sold for it shipped with 128GB of storage is wild. You should be able to opt out of it during install.
- MrVitaliy 18d agoApple seems to be doing a lot better job at integrating LLMs into OS, than Microsoft.
- therealmarv 18d agoit's okay but I wish it would be optional. Why force it on me when I don't want it? E.g. with disk space...
- Razengan 18d agoFor 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
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- muppetman 18d agoI'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.
- kalleboo 17d agoIronically in macOS 27 I've had a bunch of issues with Safari extensions. 50% of the time they don't load on their whitelisted domains. Click on their toolbar icon and they pop in.
- flockonus 15d agoAs a developer I've only updated my Mac around release date once. Faced so many bugs and incompatibilities that now I wait at least 2 months so both Apple & third party iron out the kinks.
- glimshe 18d agoWill 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.
- wilkystyle 17d agoSame problem with Brave. Really frustrating.
- glimshe 17d agoIt happens with any Chromium based browser, like Edge. Apple and Chromium keeps pointing fingers at each other, but the reality is that this only happens on Apple machines. Windows and Linux have no such problem.
- carlob 18d agohow to disable gen ai features https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250012366 https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250012366 it used to be one toggle
- keyle 18d agoRead the post. It doesn't look possible. Motives unknown.
- dawnerd 18d agoThat's frustrating. I know they want to force everyone into it because it's a future subscription rev stream for them but, come on.
- Crontab 18d agoI am not happy about the forced inclusion of AI slop into my operating system.
- alex0015 17d agoI'm a mac user but not really a power user. Is there not some hidden system directory you can go delete yourself and be done with it?
- microflash 17d ago> Repeat for each app in the list, there should be at least 70 of them. Just do it 70 times, no sweat.
- carlob 17d agocan someone figure out the right invocation of defaults write to script it? I think it would be pretty ironic if that same person used an LLM to achieve it :)
- hurfdurf 17d agoHaving to enable and use Screen Time to disable Siri AI is the level of passive-aggressiveness you almost have to admire.
- classictraffic 18d agoSo 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 18d agoMy macbook only has about 3GB of spare disk space currently, so I guess this isn't for me
- 00deadbeef 17d agoYou should try and free some up. If you're using swap you're rapidly killing your SSD as it'll struggle to do wear-levelling.
- ost-ing 18d agoIf you don't want your mbp to run like garbage, then don't update to the newest version of obsolescenceOS.
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- therealmarv 18d agoHmm, 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-review/ https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-27-the-macstories-r...
- thepryz 18d agoAgreed. While Andrew's done an okay job stepping into some big shoes, I too miss the reviews John Siracusa used to do for Ars. Same could be said for a lot of the old internet when you had people like Siracusa, Anand Lal Shimpi at AnandTech among others, providing very detailed deep dives on the latest technology.
- rrjjww 18d agoDoes it fix the hideous floating sidebar UI?
- thesdev 18d agoThat's the headline feature.
- jbverschoor 18d agoDo we have proper dictation?
- apatheticonion 18d agoWake me up when Apple releases Linux for Macs
- dsabanin 18d agoYou're in for a long hibernation my friend
- apatheticonion 18d agoSadly, I know it'll never happen. I run Asahi on my old M1 MBP and it makes me sad that Apple won't contribute to the Linux use case.
- tpmoney 18d agohttps://mklinux.org https://mklinux.org Probably not what you had in mind though...
- gorfian_robot 18d agoso I have to get a mac from mainland china to opt out? #Weird
- Lammy 18d ago> Golden Gate is our second consecutive release named for a body of water, following a stretch of releases named for towns/regions (Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma, Sequoia) Monterey is a body of water tho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monterey_Bay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monterey_Bay So is Sonoma if you're talking about the Creek instead of the Valley surrounding the creek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoma_Creek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoma_Creek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napa_Sonoma_Marsh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napa_Sonoma_Marsh
- hirvi74 18d agoThe new Siri AI is so incredibly disappointing. I only wanted one thing, and one thing only -- enhanced automation. I don't give a fuck if Siri AI can edit little pictures or some bullshit. I wanted something that could actually replace AppleScript/Automator to a useful degree. Something that actually could interact with the system. Of course, that is asking for too much. Still no way to move an application window from one space to another without a mouse. If you have a disability, then I guess you cannot really use spaces, which is poor design. But it's not like Apple cares. Snow Leopard had this ability back in 2010. Why it was removed is beyond me. I am die hard Apple fanboy, but I feel ashamed for having hope in '27.
- justinator 18d agoOther than the 17G LM and associate features I won't use and will attempt at least to ignore, looks like a boring release with some good bug fixes including cosmetic. So, alright. I'm happy to have gotten the max SSD when I got this thing, and I'm already juggling external drives (mostly for large media projects). I guess business as usual.
- ValentineC 18d agoFrom the article: > I’d expect this to be the tip of the spear for eventually removing all HFS support from macOS, but given the timescale of the AFP transition, I wouldn’t be too worried about it evaporating in the next year or two. This is madness. From what I understand, APFS isn't great for spinning rust hard disks, and I'm sure some people still use those in some way, maybe as external drives.
- eviks 17d agoThe review wastes way too much space on tiny things that could be a bullet point in a collapsed-by-default section (whole 7 paragraphs on such a critical OS feature as it's installer icon?) > The project’s last official update was nearly a year ago, In fact it was last week
- 00deadbeef 17d agoThere's no mention of Mission Control in this review, but lots of people are complaining it's turned into a buggy and useless mess in macOS 27.
- thewhitetulip 17d agoWill this 15gb model that gets download by default hinder an old m1 air?