macOS 27 Golden Gate to Drop Intel Mac Support, Limit Rosetta 2

As Apple announced last year, this year’s macOS release will end support for Intel Macs. The macOS 27 Golden Gate release will require a Mac with an Apple Silicon chip inside, including the original M1 that launched in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini back in late 2020. Intel Macs running macOS 26 Tahoe can expect security and Safari patches for about two more years after the release of macOS 27 Golden Gate. Macs running macOS 15 Sequoia will receive one more year of updates. Apple Silicon Macs will still be able to run Intel Mac apps via the Rosetta 2 compatibility layer in macOS 27, but future releases will begin to limit the technology (Apple has said it will mainly be used to support older games that still use Intel code). This change has been a long time coming, and every new macOS release has left a longer and longer list of Intel Macs behind. But many Mac owners who purchased late-model Intel machines in 2019 and 2020 could still run the latest version of the operating system, and third-party utilities like the OpenCore Legacy Patcher helped more adventurous Mac owners use their unsupported hardware a bit longer. Those workarounds will presumably no longer work for macOS 27 Golden Gate. Apple is jettisoning most of the remaining Intel code in macOS, as it did when ending support for PowerPC machines in the Mac OS X Snow Leopard release; without that code, continuing to force new macOS versions to run on old Intel machines will become functionally impossible. Even some Apple Silicon Macs will miss out on some of the new Apple Intelligence features Apple demonstrated during its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote today. The basic version of Apple Intelligence will continue to work on all Apple Silicon Macs, including M1 devices and models like the MacBook Neo with just 8GB of RAM. But Apple’s more capable on-device models will require an M3 Mac or newer with at least 12GB of RAM. The first macOS 27 and developer beta is available now, and a version aimed at public beta testers will follow in July. The final release will land in the fall.