Every major upgrade to macOS results in software compatibility problems, where some apps work poorly or won’t launch. Most of us will have to update at least a few apps to make them work correctly under macOS 27 Golden Gate. If history is any indication, some incompatible apps won’t have an update available right away, and a few might never have one. But many developers work hard to ensure that their software is ready for each new version of macOS, and “macOS 27-compatible” software updates have already been appearing for months.

RoaringApps maintains a wiki that lists thousands of Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps and the current status of their compatibility with various operating system versions (including macOS 27), as reported by users. Although this list is neither exhaustive nor definitive, it provides a quick way to check on the apps most important to you.

Update your remaining apps

The macOS 27 installer looks for, and disables, certain types of incompatible software—but there’s no guarantee it will find everything. Given the choice, you’re usually better off upgrading third-party software before you install a new version of your operating system. (You may occasionally run into an app with a newer version designed to run only on macOS 27; in such limited cases, you may have to install the updated software after upgrading to macOS 27.)

Apple built an update mechanism into the App Store, so any apps you downloaded from the App Store can also be updated there—and App Store updates are free. To check for and apply App Store updates:

1. Open the App Store app by choosing Apple menu > App Store.
2. Click Updates in the sidebar to display a list of available updates.
3. To update a single app, click the Update button next to it. Or, to update all the listed apps at once, click Update All.
4. If prompted to do so, enter your Apple Account username and password, and click Sign In.

The App Store downloads and installs the updates automatically.

Software that doesn’t come from the App Store requires a separate update mechanism. Happily, most modern apps contain some sort of update feature. In each non–App Store app that you use frequently, look for a Check for Updates command (the wording may vary). Such commands usually appear in the application menu, the Help menu, or the Settings window.

Remember to check for updates of setting panes, status menus, browser extensions, and other system enhancements too.

Back up your disk

I consider a solid backup plan to be essential for every Mac user. I hope you already perform backups regularly, and if you don’t, this is a perfect time to start before you upgrade to macOS 27. Here are some of the ways you can achieve that:

• Create a data-only duplicate: macOS splits your startup volume in two: one volume holds macOS itself; the other, with “- Data” appended to the name, holds everything else. (Most users will never notice this split, because Apple does some magic behind the scenes to make it appear, in most places, that you have just one volume, called Macintosh HD by default.) Because only that data volume contains your personal files, settings, and apps that weren’t included with macOS, that’s all you really need to back up. Backup apps such as Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! can clone just the data volume if you like. (You’ll have to jump through a few hoops to restore that data if you eventually decide to downgrade; see how to downgrade macOS for details.)

Consult the documentation for whichever app you choose for complete instructions, but the basic idea is: first, erase the external SSD using Disk Utility; then, open the backup app, select your Data volume as the source and the external drive as the destination, and click the button to start the duplication process.

Although an SSD is all but mandatory as a startup volume in macOS these days, it’s fine to use a hard drive for a data-only duplicate (or a Time Machine backup, for that matter), since you won’t be booting from it.

• Create a full Time Machine backup: To hear Apple tell the story, Time Machine is the only backup solution anyone needs. Attach an external hard drive or SSD, flip a switch in System Settings, and you’re done: automatic backups every hour with no further thought or fuss. Time Machine is pretty good but far from perfect. The most important drawback for our current purposes is not a flaw in Time Machine as such, but rather the fact that, for any of numerous good reasons, you may opt to exclude some items from Time Machine (by going to System Settings > General > Time Machine > Options and adding files or folders to the Exclude from Backups list). If you do that, those files can’t be restored if and when you have to revert to an older version of macOS. So, fair warning: you can use Time Machine if you like, but first remove everything from that list and make sure Time Machine completes at least one run.
• Clone if you want to: If you have the necessary hardware, software, and patience, you can create a full bootable duplicate, even on a modern Apple silicon Mac. But since this is so much more complicated and less necessary than in years past, I wouldn’t bother.

One type of backup that will not suffice for this particular purpose is an online backup using a service such as Backblaze. I like Backblaze and use it myself, but because it excludes many types of files and is unavailable to the macOS installer or Migration Assistant as a data source, it can’t be used to restore an entire Data volume after a failed upgrade.

With a backup in hand, the next decision is whether to upgrade in place or start clean.

macOS 27 Golden Gate is one of those rare upgrades (like going from Leopard to Snow Leopard, for those who remember it) that focuses more on improving what’s already there than on new features. To be sure, there are new features, including a few big ones. But even those—I’m thinking of Siri AI in particular—are mostly revisions of existing features rather than entirely novel capabilities.

In the past, Apple has released detailed descriptions of all the new features of that year’s version of macOS. This year’s macOS webpage, by contrast, is extremely light on details, focusing only on what Apple considers the key features. The extensive feature lists circulating online are based on a single slide shown in its entirety for less than two seconds during the WWDC keynote, which listed hundreds of changes across all the version 27 releases.

I read every one of those items and tried as many as I could, but many did not seem to function as described. For some features it is not clear whether Apple removed them or the description was simply too vague to work out what should happen. Apple stresses performance and reliability improvements, which are harder to test, and in some cases I never noticed the problems they addressed in the first place. So, if you’re looking for information on a feature from those lists and don’t see it here, that’s why.

What’s new

These are the biggest changes in macOS 27 you can look forward to.

These are the most notable changes and improvements since macOS 26 Tahoe:

• Liquid Glass improvements: Although Apple is still committed to the Liquid Glass user interface introduced in Tahoe, macOS 27 makes a number of changes and refinements that address some of the criticisms of the original version. See what changed in Liquid Glass.
• Performance improvements: Apple has fixed bugs while increasing speed, reliability, and smoothness across many aspects of macOS. You should find better performance and fewer bugs across numerous aspects of macOS 27.
• Siri AI: The much-maligned Siri of yesteryear has been replaced with a completely new engine that’s far more powerful and convenient. And Apple has blurred the distinction between Siri and Apple Intelligence. See Siri AI on the Mac.
• Child safety: Although macOS has long included a robust set of features intended to keep children safe, macOS 27 adds several more. See the child safety features.
• Everything else: As usual, many aspects of macOS, including about two dozen built-in apps, have new features and capabilities. See the other system improvements and the app improvements.

In addition, if you’re upgrading from an operating system older than macOS 15 Sequoia, you may be interested to know what other features were added along the way—as well as some that are about to disappear.

A few words about terminology

Two terms are worth pinning down:

• “M-series” vs. “Apple silicon”: Since 2020, Macs have used Apple-designed chips, which Apple calls “Apple silicon.” Basically more powerful versions of the A-series chips that had long powered iPhones, these new variants had names starting with M: M1 at first, followed by M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra, then an M2 line, an M3 line, an M4 line, and an M5 line, with many more iterations expected in the future.

Even though Apple wanted everyone to call these devices “Macs with Apple silicon,” that always seemed excessively clunky, so the shorthand “M-series Macs” was used instead. However, in March 2026, Apple released the low-cost MacBook Neo that doesn’t use an M-series chip but rather an A-series chip—a variant of the one used in the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max. There will presumably be more Macs in the future with A-series chips.

So the compact “M-series” designation is dropped, and these are now “Apple silicon Macs” or “Macs with Apple silicon.”

• “Disk” vs. “SSD”: The term “disk” refers to your Mac’s primary storage device. For all Macs that can run macOS 27, this isn’t really a disk-shaped object at all, but rather a solid-state disk (SSD), which is far, far faster and more reliable than a mechanical hard drive. However, for largely historical reasons, the word “disk” is still used throughout macOS to refer to storage devices of all kinds.

Setup Assistant includes a built-in version of the Migration Assistant app (found in /Applications/Utilities), which can copy important files from another computer or another volume onto a fresh macOS 27 Golden Gate install. We use it here to transfer the data from your backup.

To transfer your old data to your new installation, begin by selecting “From a Mac, Time Machine backup or Startup disk,” then click Continue. Then work your way through the following screens.

Transfer information to this Mac

Select your backup source—either an external drive containing a bootable or data-only duplicate, or a Time Machine volume—and click Continue. For Time Machine backups, another screen appears listing each available backup; select the one you want to use (almost certainly the most recent one) and click Continue again.

If your source disk is a startup volume protected with FileVault, you’ll be prompted to enter the disk’s password.

Select the information to transfer

Now, select the kinds of data you want to transfer. The screen shows the size of each item. As you make your selections, the total size of the selected items, along with available space on your macOS 27 volume, updates automatically. (It may take a few minutes for the installer to initially display and calculate the size of each option.)

If the volume you’re transferring from has only one user account, you may see only three checkboxes, all selected by default: Applications, Documents & Data (with an accompanying Edit button), and System & Network. If the volume has more than one user account, you’ll see a scrolling list that contains numerous items—again, all selected by default: Applications, each user account listed by name, an Other Files & Folders entry, and System & Network.

Here’s an explanation of each option, and my recommendations:

• Applications: This option transfers the contents of your previous /Applications folder (and its subfolders, such as Utilities), skipping any applications already installed as part of macOS 27. Because you may find it tedious to reinstall your applications, leave this option selected, as it is by default.

If you select Applications, the macOS 27 installer also copies the contents of /Library on your previous system. This is extremely good, because that folder contains many support files without which some apps can’t run.

• Documents & Data: If you have just one user account, you’ll see an option labeled Documents & Data—this refers to the data in your user account. Click Edit to view its contents. In the dialog that appears, you can deselect any top-level folder within the account, except for the Library folder. Along with the visible top-level folders is a folder called Other Data. Apple doesn’t specify what this includes, so I suggest leaving it selected just in case it contains anything you need. Finally, there’s an option labeled “Other files and folders.” This refers to any files or folders at the root level of your old volume as well as anything in the /Users/Shared folder. I suggest leaving this enabled.
• User accounts: If you have more than one user account, each is shown at the top level of the list.

This list may include “users” that don’t have a conventional user account or home folder on your Mac, but which your Mac considers to have an account of a sort—people with whom you’ve shared files using System Settings > General > Sharing, for example, or special low-level accounts added by software such as MacPorts or a VPN service. It’s best to leave such user accounts selected, even if they have no home folder or appear to contain no data.

Transferring a user means copying the user’s entire home folder (/Users/SomeUserName), if any, to the macOS 27 volume; once a user is transferred, the user can log in without having to set up an account again. You should transfer all the existing users unless you have accounts that are no longer in use. You can, if you like, deselect any individual (top-level) folders within a user’s home folder to skip copying those to your macOS 27 volume. As for the unexplained Other Data folder (mentioned in the previous bullet point), the safest course is to leave it selected.

If you don’t transfer at least one account, your screens later in these steps will be slightly different. Also, if you ever want to transfer any of these accounts, now is by far the best time to do so; copying files manually may cause you no end of grief and even the standalone Migration Assistant may introduce unwanted complications.

• Other Files & Folders: As in the single-user account setting described in the second bullet point, this option refers to any files or folders at the root level of your old volume as well as anything in the /Users/Shared folder. I suggest leaving this enabled.
• System & Network: This category sometimes has up to three sub-items that you can select: System Settings includes certain system-wide settings, such as sharing settings, energy saver settings, and parental controls. Printers refers to your printer settings. Network includes the settings on your Network setting pane. I suggest leaving System & Network (and all sub-items, if present) checked.

After making your selections, click Continue.

Your Mac may display a screen asking you to set passwords for each user account that you’re migrating to your new macOS 27 volume. You must set a password for at least one administrator account you want to migrate; administrator accounts for which you don’t set a password can’t be copied to your macOS 27 volume. So, click Set Password next to an account name, enter and repeat a password for that user (which can be the same as the password that user currently uses), and click Set Password. Repeat for each administrator account you want to migrate.

If you’re asked to set up passwords and your backup contains accounts for any non-administrators, the installer screen automatically assigns them a new, temporary password. Be sure to write this password down (or take a photo, or both), as it won’t be shown again. Alternatively, you can click Promote to Admin and follow the prompts to promote any or all of these users to administrators. (You can always demote them to standard users later by going to System Settings > Users & Groups.)

Transferring your information

Migration Assistant copies the selected items to your new macOS 27 volume, a process that may take just a few minutes or several hours, depending on how much data you are transferring. (And you should completely disregard any time estimates you see—as elsewhere in the installer, they’re wildly inaccurate.) Your Mac may restart during the transfer process.

Migration completed

At the end of the migration process, and after one last restart, a Migration Completed screen appears, stating that your data has been migrated and is ready to use. Click Done to dismiss the window. At this point, your Mac should prompt you to log in, and then just a few questions remain.

The nuke-and-pave option

Some people want to do a truly clean clean install of macOS 27 Golden Gate—that is, install a pristine copy of macOS completely from scratch, with no migration of older apps and files. The technical term for such people is gluttons for punishment, because (having done this a few times myself) I can guarantee that it will involve many frustrating hours of tedious work. It’s virtually never necessary, and my professional opinion is that life is too short—you should avoid doing this.

Nevertheless, if you insist on this approach, let me offer a few tips:

• Follow everything in Plan B except the transfer part—on the Migration Assistant screen, click “Not Now.”
• Besides the usual Setup Assistant screens, you may be asked to set up other items, such as iCloud Keychain, and to select your time zone.
• Once macOS 27 is running, you’ll have to reinstall all your apps. It’s pretty easy to do that for apps from the App Store. For everything else, you’re on your own—and I hope you kept track of your license codes, because you’ll have to reenter them all!
• You’ll have to reset most of your settings from scratch. But…
• If you use iCloud, the settings and data for apps such as Mail, Contacts, and Calendar will restore themselves, as will your keychain contents (assuming you have the relevant switches enabled in System Settings > Your Name > iCloud).
• If you use Dropbox or similar cloud storage, you can log in and have all the files stored there sync back to your Mac—but be prepared for a long wait.
• You may want to copy at least some files—such as your Photos or Music libraries—from a backup if you don’t already sync them via iCloud. Guard that backup carefully until you’re certain that you have everything you need from it.

Since Apple first made major macOS upgrades available in downloadable form rather than offering DVDs (remember those?), downloading an installer meant just that: you got a separate installer app on your disk that you could open by double-clicking it. In contrast, minor updates were available through Software Update, requiring only a couple of clicks to install.

For the past several years, however, Apple has offered even major upgrades—like going from macOS 26 Tahoe to macOS 27 Golden Gate—via Software Update (that is, System Preferences > Software Update in Monterey or earlier, or System Settings > General > Software Update in Ventura or later). Besides requiring fewer steps, the downloads available through Software Update tend to be smaller and thus quicker to download than full installers.

If your Mac supports macOS 27 Golden Gate and it hasn’t yet been installed, a little badge appears on the System Settings icon and you may be tempted to simply click Upgrade Now and step through the update process there. The badge names whatever the current version of macOS 27 is, rather than 27.0.0).

Although you can use this approach, I recommend against it, for the following reasons:

• The downloads may be smaller, but you don’t get a standalone installer. That means you can’t copy it to another Mac or make a backup of the installer in case you need to use it again (see how to keep a copy).
• As a consequence of not having a full installer app, you can’t make a bootable installer (see making a bootable installer).
• The installer you get via Software Update does not prompt you to choose a destination (see selecting a destination); it can be used only for updating the copy of macOS on your current startup volume. That also means this approach can’t be used with Plan B. So, if you try using Software Update with Plan A and you have a problem, you’ll have to download the full installer anyway to switch to Plan B.

If you do choose to go the Software Update route, most of the installation process will be the same, and you’ll follow the same steps afterward.

Make final preparations

Now that you know which basic installation technique you’re going to use, you’re nearly ready to proceed. Your next major step (which could take hours, or even longer) is to obtain the macOS 27 installer; then I’ll recommend a few other quick, last-minute tasks before you dive in.

Obtain the installer

Depending on your situation, obtaining the macOS 27 installer may be a trivial matter of a few clicks, or it may be an involved ordeal.

If you are comfortable with the trade-offs above, you don’t have to perform a separate download at all; simply go to System Settings > General > Software Update, or System Preferences > Software Update in Monterey or earlier, and click Upgrade Now. Then click Continue, agree to the software license if prompted to do so, and skip ahead to the installation itself.

If you don’t pursue this path, you must go through a few non-obvious steps to download the macOS 27 installer, which, like Tahoe, is not available from the Mac App Store.

The easiest way to proceed is to obtain a direct download link that points directly to Apple’s servers. I can’t overemphasize how important it is to download directly from Apple. Apple doesn’t publicize such links, but the site Mr. Macintosh has very helpfully collected them for us. The site Mr. Macintosh collects them; every link there points to swcdn.apple.com, a legitimate Apple download server.

On that page, look for the most recent entry in the PUBLIC Full Installer table. Click the link to download InstallAssistant.pkg.

You might be thinking, “Don’t I want an app called Install macOS Golden Gate? What’s InstallAssistant?” In fact, InstallAssistant.pkg is a simple installer that merely puts the Install macOS Golden Gate app in your Applications folder. So, once that file has finished downloading, double-click it and follow the prompts to run the installer, which is really the installer installer. When it’s done, you’ll see Install macOS Golden Gate in your /Applications folder (unless you selected a different location for it). You can then delete the InstallAssistant.pkg file.

An alternative is a command-line program in Terminal. Enter softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 27.0 to download the full version.

Once you have it, keep a copy somewhere safe before you run it.

If you used Software Update to download macOS 27 Golden Gate, this section does not apply to you. If you downloaded a standalone installer, bear in mind that if you do an in-place upgrade (whether to your internal SSD or an external SSD), the installer is deleted from /Applications once the process is finished.

I presume the reason for this is that, once macOS 27 is installed, Apple wants to give you back the 21 GB or so of disk space the installer was taking up, since you likely won’t need the installer in the future (and can download it again if you do). But what if you want to install macOS 27 on multiple Macs—or reinstall it later on the same Mac—without having to download that huge installer again? I’ll tell you what: you’d better put that installer in a safe place before you run it! If it’s anywhere else—your desktop, ~/Downloads, or wherever—it won’t be deleted after it runs.

So, before you do anything else, I suggest that you either ⌘-drag the installer to move it from /Applications to another location, or Option-drag the installer to copy it to another location—preferably another volume—so if it is deleted, you’ll have a spare. Or create a bootable installation volume, as below.

Make a bootable installer volume

The macOS 27 installer doesn’t include or require boot media. But you might want to have a copy of the installer on a bootable disk for one of these reasons:

• As a backup, so you don’t have to re-download it if you need it in the future
• To simplify installing macOS 27 on multiple Macs
• To facilitate downgrading to your previous version of macOS should that become necessary, in which case you’d want a bootable installer volume for the old version, not for macOS 27

If none of that applies to you, skip to the last section.

To move ahead with a bootable installer volume, you’ll want a flash drive with at least 32 GB of free capacity. (A 32 GB USB flash drive can be found for under $10 online or at your favorite local electronics store.) Then you follow a simple procedure to put a bootable installer on that drive and, when the time comes, start from that volume and run the installer.

Next, you’ll use a command-line tool called createinstallmedia that is buried inside the installer (and thus is a method that Apple officially sanctions). Using this tool requires a visit to Terminal, but it’s really a matter of copying and pasting one line from Apple’s website into Terminal and replacing the name MyVolume with the name of the drive you’ll be using.

But there’s a catch, in that a bootable installer requires a full macOS installer to work with, and in some cases that may not be what you get when you download macOS 27.

Update your backup

You should already have a complete backup of your startup disk. If you did that just minutes ago—and your backup includes the macOS 27 installer file located outside the /Applications folder—then you can move along to the next step. Otherwise, I suggest updating your backup before running the installer.

With the installer safe, you can run it.

Spotlight

In macOS 27 Golden Gate, Spotlight as such behaves similarly to how it did in Tahoe—though with, Apple claims, more relevant search suggestions. The Spotlight interface has been merged with the Siri AI interface. That is to say, what you see on screen when you invoke Spotlight (via ⌘-Space or whichever custom keyboard shortcut you set) is exactly the same as what you see when you invoke Siri (via the Siri menu bar icon), and you can treat the field in which you type either as a search term or as a prompt. Instead of the former Search, rendered in gray text in the field, it now reads Search or Ask.

As in Tahoe, either before or after you enter a search term, you can narrow the search to various categories. Move the mouse or press the down arrow key to show them; Tahoe, by contrast, used the Tab or right arrow key. You can then click a category or use the arrow keys and Return to select it. Alternatively, you can press the associated keyboard shortcut shown to access each category directly.

Here are the four categories:

• Apps (⌘-1): In this view, only apps are shown (regardless of where they’re located on your Mac). Recently used apps appear at the top, until you start typing.
• Files (⌘-2): Similarly, in this view, only files and folders appear, but that includes apps, too! Again, recent files appear at the top (below Suggestions, explained in a moment) until you start typing.

Results in Apps and Files categories include items on your iPhone, if you’ve set up iPhone Mirroring.

• Actions: (⌘-3): Actions are activities (some provided by Apple, others provided by third-party apps) that you can access directly from Spotlight without opening apps or performing additional steps.
• Clipboard (⌘-4): Spotlight can keep track of things you’ve put on your clipboard previously, including them in search results, as long as this feature is enabled (as it is by default): go to System Settings > Spotlight, scroll to the bottom, and turn Results from Clipboard on or off.

Shortcuts

The Shortcuts user interface was overhauled significantly to steer users away from manually creating shortcuts and toward its major new feature: the Apple Intelligence-powered “Describe a shortcut.” When you click the plus button on the toolbar, you now see a big “What do you want your shortcut to do?” banner.

In the “Describe a shortcut” field at the bottom, type out what you’d like your shortcut to do. Apple Intelligence then takes a first stab at it. You can try out the shortcut and, if it doesn’t work quite right, type a correction in the “Describe a change” field. With any new or existing shortcut, you can select it and click the Edit button on the toolbar to bring up the full Shortcuts editor, which has been rearranged a bit and now includes a Pinned section.

Although the existing interface for creating Automations is still there, a new method is available, too: when editing a shortcut, go to the Automation category in the right-hand sidebar and double-click an automation (such as Time of Day or Message). This adds it to the top of the shortcut so you can configure it while creating or editing a shortcut.

Shortcuts features several new systemwide actions:

• Notification: This action runs when you receive a notification from a specified app.
• Screenshot: This action runs when you save a screenshot to Photos, Files, and/or your Clipboard.
• Store Content, Get Stored Content, and Delete Stored Content: You can now store data within Shortcuts itself, rather than having to create and manage external files.

In addition, there are new actions for several Apple apps:

• Mail: There’s a new Find Message action for Mail.
• Messages: New actions for Messages include Delete Conversations, Delete Messages, Mark as Read, Open Inbox, Search in Messages, and Send Tapback.
• Photos: The new actions for Photos are Auto Enhance Photo, Delete Albums, Delete Photos, Favorite Albums, Find Albums, and Hide Photos.
• Reminders: The Reminders app has new Create Group, Create Section, Delete Groups, Delete Lists, Delete Sections, and Edit List actions.

In addition, some actions have expanded capabilities:

• Get What’s On Screen now lets you specify a data type, such as Images, Text, or Web Pages.
• If now lets you specify multiple conditions, evaluated with Any or All (much like rules in Mail). To add conditions, click the plus button in the If action.

The list of changes in the Photos app is much longer than in any other app, though most of them are small. I won’t describe them all here, though I refer you to Jason Snell’s Take Control of Photos; Jason is currently updating it for the version 27 operating systems.

• Shared album improvements: When you share an album via iCloud, other participants can now see and interact with it even on Windows PCs and Android phones. In addition, you can “upgrade” your shared albums to show photos and videos at full resolution and enable several other features. To do so, right-click or Control-click an album in the sidebar and choose Upgrade Shared Album; this walks you through a series of steps, after which Photos spends a considerable amount of time—perhaps hours—thinking.

At the end of the process, a Manage Shared Album button appears at the top of the window. Click this to open a dialog with extensive sharing options:

• Permissions: Click the More button next to any participant to change their permission to any of three levels: Can View and Comment, Can Add Photos, or Can Manage Album and Photos. You can also show each person’s contact info or remove the participant, and you can invite new participants.
• Copy Album Link: You can get a link to the shared album and set whether it works for People You Choose or Anyone with the Link.
• Access Requests: Turn this on to permit other people with the link to request access, which you must then manually approve.
• Make Album Temporary: If you turn this on, the album becomes ephemeral, disappearing from Photos after 30 days. To prevent any photos or videos in the album from disappearing too, you must save them to your library first.
• Allow Notifications: Turn this on to be notified when there are changes to the shared album.
• Delete Shared Album: Click this to delete the album completely.

Other devices must be running iOS 27, iPadOS 27 or macOS 27 to use the upgraded features.

There’s a downside to upgrading, though: these higher-resolution shared photos now count toward your iCloud Drive quota, which may require you to buy a more expensive iCloud+ plan.

• New Clean Up: Apple has rebuilt the Apple Intelligence-driven Clean Up feature rolled out in macOS 26 (and on other platforms), and it works substantially better.
• Spatial Reframing: If a photo was taken from an inauspicious angle, you can now adjust the angle, within limits, for a more pleasing effect, thanks to Apple Intelligence.
• Extending: Suppose a photo is cropped too narrowly, or that the subject is off-center. Photos can now use Apple Intelligence to fill in areas adjacent to the area actually captured by generating new pixels that seamlessly blend in with what’s already in the photo.

Both Spatial Reframing and Extending are inventing details, not extracting data from the photo. Be sure you want photo-generated components in your image.

If everything has gone as expected, your Mac is now successfully running macOS 27 Golden Gate. (If things haven’t gone as expected, see what to do when the upgrade goes wrong.) But there are still a few tasks left to do before you get to work—or play—with your new operating system. Here I cover some important initial setup and configuration activities you should get out of the way right now.

Respond to immediate questions

Depending on your starting point, configuration, and upgrade path, you may see a normal desktop and nothing more after installing. In other situations—especially when you have a lot of third-party software—you may be immediately confronted with a large stack of overlapping dialogs and notifications.

Among the most common questions are requests for your user account password or Apple Account password. For example, certain apps may once again need an administrator’s authorization to make changes to your data, and apps that use your Apple Account may need you to sign in again. You’ll also see requests to enable notifications; permit apps to have access to your contacts, calendars, bookmarks, and various resources in System Settings > Privacy & Security—among other alerts.

For example, you may see one or more notifications requesting for permission for apps to access other devices on your local network. This is not suspicious behavior, and it’s fine to allow it.

Work your way through any such dialogs you see, even if they seem redundant or if they ask for permissions you’d previously granted. After that one-time process, most of them will not reappear.

Handle software updates

The next thing you should do is to update macOS itself (and any other crucial Apple software) to the latest version. Sometimes Apple releases bug fixes and security updates almost immediately after a major upgrade, and if any such urgent updates are available, it’s in your best interest to install them right away. (This can be true even if you immediately purchase a newly introduced Mac later this year that can only run macOS 27 and later. Those Macs were “imaged” with the version of macOS 27.0 weeks before they shipped.)

Software Update and the App Store should automatically notify you when updates are available, but I recommend looking at the Software Update pane manually after your Mac starts up under macOS 27 for the first time. Start with System Settings > General > Software Update for updates to macOS 27 itself.

In addition to installing any updates, decide how you want Software Update to handle future updates. Your Mac automatically checks for and can optionally download and even install updates in the background.

1. Go to System Settings > General > Software Update. macOS checks for updates, and any available updates appear. To apply them, click Update Now.
2. Click the Info button next to Automatic Updates. A dialog appears.
3. macOS always checks for updates automatically. Whether it actually does anything when an update is available depends on your other choices here:
   • Download new updates when available, which not only notifies you of updates but also downloads them for you so you can install them as soon as you’re ready. In the notification, click Install to install immediately; click Later and choose Try in an Hour, Try Tonight, or Remind Me Tomorrow to snooze the reminder; or click the notification itself to open the App Store.
   • Install macOS updates, which downloads and installs updates to macOS itself and asks you to restart your Mac. You may be prompted for your password if you change this.
   • Install system data files and security updates, which installs these essential updates without prompting you and without requiring a restart.

For updates to other Apple software and third-party apps you’ve purchased from the App Store, choose Apple menu > App Store. Then click Updates in the sidebar. To update a single app or group of apps, click the Update button next to it. Or, to update all the listed apps at once, click Update All. The App Store downloads and installs the updates automatically. While you’re at it, make sure App Store is set up for automatic updates. In Sequoia and earlier, the Software Update pane of System Settings included an “Install application updates from the App Store” switch. That’s no longer there in macOS 27; instead, it’s right here: go to App Store > Settings and select Automatic Updates.

Deal with other surprises

You may encounter a couple of other peculiarities when first using macOS 27 that cause some initial surprise.

Apple Mail

The first time you launch Mail under macOS 27, a window may inform you that it’s “optimizing” your Mail database. This step should take no more than a few minutes, and is necessary because the macOS 27 version of Mail has updated the database format it uses to store information about your messages.

System Settings

As a reminder for those upgrading from macOS 12 Monterey or earlier, the app formerly known as System Preferences is gone, replaced with a new one called System Settings, which looks quite a bit different. See what changed in System Settings.

Siri and search optimization

The massive overhaul in Siri technology also comes with a complete redo of Spotlight searching in macOS. The new indexing process can apparently take longer—potentially far longer than the previous Spotlight indexing. You might see a note that Siri and Search are optimizing in Settings > Siri or Settings > Spotlight until this is complete.

However, Apple said it would release the indexing update to macOS 26 Tahoe, so that the task would slowly happen over the summer. Then, when you upgrade to macOS 27, the index can be used immediately. I’m not sure how this will play out in practice.

With each new release of macOS, Apple adds, removes, relocates, and renames a bunch of controls in System Settings. macOS 27 Golden Gate is no different, although the changes from Tahoe are quite minor.

To open System Settings, click its Dock icon, double-click System Settings in the Applications folder, or choose Apple menu > System Settings.

As always, it can be difficult to locate a particular setting among the hundreds in System Settings. If you happen to know where a setting is, you can select a category in the sidebar on the left and then navigate to the desired spot on the right. If not, your best bet is to use the Search field, which nearly always shows you what you’re looking for—even if you don’t know the exact name of a feature or setting.

You can see an alphabetical list of all the panes on the View menu; choose a pane to go directly to it.

What follows is what changed between Tahoe and macOS 27, pane by pane, in the order they appear in the sidebar. The Siri pane changed most of all and is covered separately.

Battery settings

Where Tahoe had a Low Power Mode pop-up menu with options Only on Battery, Only on Power Adapter, Never, or Always, macOS 27 instead has two pop-up menus, one for “On battery” and the other for “On power adapter.” For each one, you can choose Automatic, Low Power, or High Power.

General settings

In the AutoFill & Passwords category, there’s a new “AutoFill from” switch, with entries indicating which app(s) can be used to supply AutoFill data. By default, Passwords is the only option (turned on by default), but if you have one or more third-party password managers, they may also appear here.

Accessibility settings

The following categories of Accessibility settings have changes:

• Display: There’s a new “Show borders” switch, which adds borders around toolbar controls, Search fields, and various other interface items to more clearly distinguish their boundaries; this replaces and significantly improves on the previous setting “Show toolbar button shapes.”
• Subtitles and Captioning: This category, which replaces Captions, adds three new controls to fine-tune when and where subtitles/captions appear: “Show when muted,” “Show on skip back,” and “Apply across apps.”

Menu Bar settings

A new “Show suggestions in Control Gallery” switch lets macOS display suggestions when you click Add Controls. Turn it off to remove the suggestions.

Wallpaper settings

As usual, macOS 27 features new static and dynamic wallpapers, and a new screen saver. You’ll never guess which bridge appears in the new images.

Lock Screen settings

A new “Show user name and photo” switch is on by default, giving you the same behavior seen in Tahoe and earlier. But if you turn it off, usernames and photos no longer appear when your Mac is locked, which might be better for privacy in settings where a Mac may be visible to the public.

Keyboard settings

The “Auto-punctuation” switch under Dictation is gone, presumably because automatic punctuation is always on and, according to Apple, greatly improved in macOS 27.

macOS 27 Golden Gate expands the existing Family features parents and guardians can use to restrict their kids’ screen usage, with an emphasis on safety. (You must first enable a Family account and add family members in System Settings > Family.) These new features require that both the parents’ and kids’ devices are running iOS 27, iPadOS 27 or macOS 27 or later; if you haven’t already done so, a message at the top of the Family setting pane reminds you.

These features are described generally rather than step by step, because testing them requires a second device signed in to a child account.

Beyond those features, the Family pane offers a simplified interface that lets parents review their kids’ screen usage time, pause device use, temporarily lift restrictions, or change a schedule with just a few clicks.

Grant per-website browsing permission

For years, families have been able to use the Ask to Buy feature, in which children must have an adult’s explicit approval to purchase apps from the App Store. In macOS 27, this concept expands to include websites. If you enable Ask to Browse for a child, each visit to a website that’s not already approved pops up an Ask to Browse message on the child’s device. If the child requests permission, the parent or guardian sees a request in Messages showing the website in question, along with Approve and Decline buttons.

Ask to Browse works in Safari and other WebKit browsers, but not in Firefox or Chromium-based browsers, which means that any child who can figure out how to download an alternative browser can bypass this feature with trivial ease.

Enforce Communication Safety

Communication Safety is an existing feature that, if enabled, warns children before displaying nude images in apps such as FaceTime and Messages, whether those images are incoming or outgoing. macOS 27 expands this to block violent or gory images, giving the child a way to end the conversation without seeing the objectionable material.

Set time allowances and schedules

Parents now have detailed controls available for restricting when, and for how long, children can use certain types of apps (including games and social media apps). You can, for example, restrict your child to playing games for just an hour a day, or set up a schedule with fine-grained controls, such as “you can use apps A, B, and C before or after school, but only D or E while at school, and F and G only in the evenings.”