GoKawiilApple Intelligence is back, baby! That’s right: Two years after its initial launch, Apple is giving its generative AI features their first significant upgrade, along with a new version of Siri that the company has been strongly insinuating would be a part of each of the last two macOS releases, without ever actually announcing a release date.
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. Ready or not, here it is.
But if you can manage to look past that fanfare somehow, the operating system underneath Apple Intelligence is getting the kind of update that macOS users usually proclaim to like. Golden Gate addresses the most irritating of macOS 26 Tahoe’s design sins, adds a big pile of incremental improvements, and promises a bunch of under-the-hood fit-and-finish optimizations to make common tasks feel just a little faster and more reliable than before.
This makes for a combination that is occasionally jarring: big, hard-to-ignore and impossible-to-disable AI changes wedded to an understated update that in other years might have been called a “Snow Leopard release.”
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System requirements: Farewell to Intel
The Golden Gate update is the first macOS release since the mid-2000s not to run on any Intel Macs. Six years after the beginning of the Apple Silicon era, Apple has dropped support for the last handful of 2019 and 2020-era Intel Macs that could officially run macOS 26 Tahoe.