macOS 27 Golden Gate drops Intel Macs and pushes Apple Intelligence further
The new macOS requires an Apple M1 chip or newer, and Apple Intelligence can no longer be switched off or deleted.
macOS 27 Golden Gate is the first macOS release since the mid-2000s that runs on no Intel Macs. Apple has ended support for the last 2019 and 2020-era Intel models that could run macOS 26 Tahoe; Golden Gate needs an Apple M1 chip or newer. That covers the 2020 M1 MacBook Air or newer, the 2020 M1 MacBook Pro or newer and the 2020 M1 Mac mini or newer.
Apple Intelligence defines the release. Two years after its launch, the generative AI features get their first significant upgrade, alongside a new version of Siri. The toggle that let users turn Apple Intelligence off and delete the gigabytes of AI models it downloads to disk is gone.
Underneath, Golden Gate addresses the design complaints of macOS 26 Tahoe and adds a large set of incremental improvements, with optimizations meant to make common tasks faster and more reliable. Because every supported Mac is Apple Silicon, all of them can run Apple Intelligence, which never ran on Intel hardware.
