I’d echo that (iPad Air 11", iPhone 17 Pro Max), and add that the biggest improvement I’ve seen so far is in CarPlay. The display is much “flatter”, and to me, much more readable at a glance, which of course is what you want to do while driving. And Maps on CarPlay also seems to update more quickly.
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I had to upgrade to Bartender 7 in order to use Bartender on GG on my M5 MacBook Air.
I’m curious: For those still running Sequoia (like myself), and planning to upgrade to Golden Gate at some point in the next 6 months:
Are you reluctant to upgrade directly from Sequoia to Golden Gate, and plan to perform an “intermediate” upgrade to Tahoe, and then upgrade to Golden Gate very soon afterwards?
When the time comes, I will go directly from Sequoia to Golden Gate. If there are issues doing that, I suppose we’ll hear about them over the next few weeks.
FWIW, I’ve never had a problem on those couple of occasions where I’ve skipped a major release or two.
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I’ve had the Golden Gate running on an external drive since the day after it was announced back in June.
But I have NO plans to update the internal SSD on my 2024 m4 Mini to it.
At all.
This Mini will stick with Sequoia (the OS it came with) for the foreseeable future.
My earlier Mini – 2018 (intel) – is still running the OS it came with (Mojave). The role of that Mac was to be one that would run 32-bit apps for as long as I needed to run them. It still does…
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Would recommend two things: 1) Insure that all your software is compatible with Golden Gate. 2) Wait until at least V27.2 arrives. It is been the case for just about every nre release of the mac OS that the first few versions have bugs. I actually will probably wait until V27.3 arrives, as I just recently “moved” from Sequoia to Tahoe.
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I upgraded all my apple stuff to 27. I increased Liquid Glass transparency as I find it more pleasing to see through the controls to my content. Everything is running fine so far. One day on the waitlist for Siri AI and now all are on (three different accounts).
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I will go directly from Sequoia to Golden Gate but not yet.
My last upgrade was directly from Mojave on a MacPro to Sequoia on an M2 Max Studio. There were no issues. Migration Assistant has become quite robust over the years.
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That’s interesting – I’m using Bartender 6.6.2 with Golden Gate without any visible issues. And Bartender says this is the most recent update. Did you mean Bartender 6 rather than 7?
You may want to wait on tvOS 27 if you currently use Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil to stream audio to an AppleTV. RA has an information page on it, but the bottom line is that until Apple fixes what RA calls a bug in tvOS 27, it just won’t work. Learned the hard way. 
[9/26/26: Rogue Amoeba updated the page linked above saying they have now fixed the issue.]
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Bartender 7 is available on Bartender website. It runs on GG without any problems. When I tried using Bartender 6.6.2, it had major problems with arranging Menu Bar, unlike version 7.
That depends on the apps you have in the menubar. Last time I tried it was a complete fail because I use iStat Menus. Thaw (which also has active updates) is the same, if not worse. So right now, all menu bar apps need to be tested alongside other apps before committing to a product.
Very disappointed that Apple Watch 27 eliminated the Walkie-Talkie app. Any thoughts on why they did that, and if it is likely to reappear?
I have yet to upgrade, perhaps someone can answer this question: does syncing with iTunes via a USB cable still work? I have my non-cloud based music library on an older MacPro, and it currently syncs to an iPhone 16 (iOS 26.x).
Will likely wait until after January to get GG. Still using FMPro 19 to support a set of local middle school academic league database scripts, and can’t afford to take a chance that GG might break them. Have no need for the later FMPro bells and whistles, and hope to avoid having to upgrade it anytime soon.
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One new peculiarity: my menu bar keeps disappearing, only to reappear if I click where it should be. I do have System Settings>Menu Bar set to Automatically hide and show the menu bar: In Full Screen Only. If I set it to Never, it remains if I make an app full screen, which I don’t want.
Sync with Music and Classical does…
I’ve seen it reported that it’s because very few people used the feature so it wasn’t worth maintaining it going forward. Of course it’s impossible to say - perhaps there will be an unexpected uproar that will force Apple to restore it. But I find it extremely unlikely that it will come back.
That seems definitely like a bug! I’ve never had it happen to me. Another good reason for avoiding the move to Golden Gate now. Plan on waiting until at least v27.2 is released. Tahoe is just fine (although slower than Sequoia).
No review of the 27 release that I have read prepared me for the amount of sheer space it occupies in your device’s persistent storage. I have an iPad Air 5th Generation 64GB, and installing iPadOS 27 almost completely ate its storage. The effect was so dramatic that I did something I never thought I’d do: I wiped the iPad and reverted it to version 26.2. I then allowed it to update to 26.7, because even though this is significantly larger than 26.2, it has security updates I didn’t want to lose. But this far and no further for this device. I use my iPad mainly for watching movies nowadays, so there’s no great loss.