Golden Gate's defaults are aimed at showing off what's new: plenty of glass, Siri in every corner, and Safari reorganizing your tabs for you. Some of that you'll like. Some of it you'll want gone within an hour.

Here's what to adjust first, in order of how much difference it makes, plus two optional Terminal tweaks for the most common annoyance. Wait until the upgrade has finished and you've restarted once, then work through the list.

1. Set Liquid Glass to a level you can read

If Tahoe's translucency bothered you, this is the most important setting in Golden Gate.

Go to System Settings > Appearance and find the Liquid Glass control. It runs from very clear to fully tinted. You may already have picked a level during setup; this is where you change it.

A practical way to choose: open a window over a busy wallpaper or a colorful web page, then move the control until sidebar and toolbar text is easy to read at a glance. For most people that's somewhere past the middle toward tinted.

Want no glass at all? System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce Transparency still exists and overrides everything.

2. Decide how Safari handles your tabs

Golden Gate uses Apple Intelligence to organize related tabs into groups automatically, and the feature is on by default. If you keep tabs in a particular order, or you've noticed tabs landing in the wrong group, switch it to suggestions.

In Safari, go to Settings > Tabs, find Organize Tabs, and choose Show Related Tabs. Safari will suggest groupings, and you decide whether to accept them.

While you're in Safari, try Notify Me: click the page menu button on the left of the address bar on a page you check regularly, like a product listing or a status page, and Safari can alert you when it changes.

3. Choose whether you want Siri AI

The upgrade doesn't turn on Siri AI automatically. To get it, go to System Settings > Siri and click Try Siri AI (Beta), which adds you to a waitlist. Your device language and Siri language both need to be set to English. If you'd rather not use it, simply don't join.

Before deciding, know the current limits: Siri AI launches as a beta, in English, with daily usage limits, and more languages are due in October. The most capable version needs an M3 or later with 12 GB of memory.

If you enable it, two new habits are worth learning:

  • Command-Space now opens Spotlight with Siri AI built in. Type a normal search or a question.
  • Command-Shift-6 starts Visual Intelligence: select part of the screen and ask about it.

4. Clean up the "Ask Siri" clutter

With Siri AI enabled, Golden Gate adds an Ask Siri item to right-click menus across the system, and a floating Siri button that appears when you type or select text. Many people find both intrusive. There's no setting to remove either without turning off Siri AI entirely.

There are Terminal workarounds, shared and tested by users on the MacRumors forums. Before you use them, understand what they are: undocumented tweaks that rely on current macOS internals. They may stop working in any update, and a similar tweak in Tahoe that brought back Launchpad ended up breaking Spotlight in the final release. Use them only if the clutter really bothers you, and keep the undo commands.

Remove Ask Siri from right-click menus. This works by setting an allowlist for Apple menu items. Golden Gate stops inserting Ask Siri whenever that list is present, even though the list itself keeps every Apple menu item visible. Run in Terminal (zsh, the default shell): 

items=(soft apwn exit loca lock logo rlgo rcnt rrst rest rsdn shut slep spro syss)
vals=(-int 0)
for c in $items; do vals+=(-int $(( 16#$(printf %s "$c" | xxd -p) ))); done
defaults write -g NSAppleMenuAllowedItems -array "${vals[@]}"

Restart the Mac. If any item goes missing from the Apple menu, or you want Ask Siri back: 

defaults delete -g NSAppleMenuAllowedItems

Remove the floating Siri button over text:

sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool false

Restart. To undo:

sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS

5. Review what launches in the background

Major upgrades can re-enable background helpers you'd turned off, and some apps add new ones when they update for macOS 27.

Open System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions. Check both the apps that open at login and the list of items allowed to run in the background. Turn off anything you don't recognize or don't need. Fewer background processes means less memory use and better battery life, which helps most on 8 GB Macs.

6. Check your menu bar

Golden Gate changed how the menu bar is drawn, which broke most third-party menu bar managers. If icons you rely on seem to have vanished, look for the new overflow button, which reveals icons that don't fit, especially on MacBooks with a notch.

If you use Bartender, Ice, or a similar tool, check for a Golden Gate version before rebuilding your layout.

7. Install Rosetta if you use older software

Rosetta 2 isn't installed by default on Golden Gate. Intel apps prompt you to install it, but plug-ins inside other apps may not. If you use Intel-only audio plug-ins or older utilities, install it now: 

softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

Also look at System Settings > General > About > Intel-based Apps. Everything listed there will stop opening in macOS 28, so it's your replacement list for the year.

8. Take control of future macOS upgrades

Golden Gate's first bug-fix updates are still ahead. If you prefer to read release notes before installing, go to System Settings > General > Software Update, click the info button next to Automatic Updates, and turn off automatic installation of macOS updates. Leave security responses on.

Also check Beta Updates is set to Off, unless you intentionally test betas. Apple is already testing macOS 27.2.

What not to change yet

Don't rebuild the Spotlight index on day one. Golden Gate builds a new semantic index for Spotlight and Siri, and it takes a long time. Let it run overnight with the Mac plugged in. Rebuilding manually just starts over.

Don't judge battery life or performance for three days. Spotlight, Photos, and Mail are all re-indexing.

Don't install "cleaner" or "optimizer" apps to fix post-upgrade slowness. They can't speed up indexing, and some interfere with it.

The ten-minute version

  1. Appearance: set Liquid Glass to a readable level.
  2. Safari > Settings > Tabs: switch Organize Tabs to suggestions.
  3. System Settings > Siri: decide on Siri AI.
  4. Optional: remove Ask Siri clutter with the Terminal tweaks, and keep the undo commands.
  5. Login Items & Extensions: turn off what you don't need.
  6. Check the menu bar and your menu bar manager.
  7. Install Rosetta if you use Intel plug-ins; review Intel-based Apps.
  8. Software Update: turn off automatic macOS upgrades and betas.

Then plug in, leave the Mac alone overnight, and judge Golden Gate tomorrow.