macOS 27 Golden Gate: Apple Intelligence becomes impossible to ignore
macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica Review
Ars Technica reviews macOS 27 Golden Gate, the first macOS to drop Intel Macs and require Apple Silicon. The update removes the option to disable Apple Intelligence, which now consumes gigabytes of disk space. It also brings a new Siri, under-the-hood performance improvements, and design fixes from Tahoe. The review covers system requirements, the split between older and newer Apple Silicon Macs for advanced AI features, and what to do with unsupported Macs.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- CodeWriter23
When are they gonna make "macOS South Central"?
- Lammy
> 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
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/Napa_Sonoma_Marsh
- 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...
- carlob
how to disable gen ai features
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250012366
it used to be one toggle
- gushie
My macbook only has about 3GB of spare disk space currently, so I guess this isn't for me