macOS Tahoe 26.7 and Sequoia 15.8 are Out--More Than 150 Security Fixes Each, No New Features, and the First Update the Intel Macs Get Without Golden Gate

macOS Tahoe 26.7 and macOS Sequoia 15.8 are out. Apple released both on September 14, the day macOS 27 Golden Gate shipped, and Apple's release notes for 26.7 say only that it "provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users." It is the first update since Golden Gate for the four Intel Macs that run Tahoe and cannot run 27, and for anyone else staying put, and by our count of Apple's security page it closes 153 holes.

Nothing but security fixes, and most of them are Golden Gate's

There are no features. 9to5Mac has the builds as 25G229 for Tahoe and 24H23 for Sequoia. We compared the CVE identifiers on Apple's three pages: macOS Golden Gate 27's lists 210, Tahoe 26.7's lists 153 and Sequoia 15.8's lists 154. Of Tahoe's 153, 149 are also in Golden Gate and 140 are on all three pages. The 61 that appear only in Golden Gate are mostly single entries in parts the older systems do not share, Apple Intelligence, Siri, Safe Browsing and System Settings among them, plus six in the kernel and three in WebKit. Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company counts around 206 items for Golden Gate and says none of them is suspected of being exploited in the wild; no entry on the Tahoe or Sequoia page says so either.

The Tahoe page has 27 entries under Kernel, and nine under CUPS, the printing system, two of which read "An app may be able to gain root privileges" and one "A remote user may cause an unexpected app termination or arbitrary code execution." One Bluetooth entry, CVE-2026-65414, says "A remote attacker may be able to cause unexpected app termination or arbitrary code execution." An autofs entry lets "an attacker with control of a network directory server" run code as root, a udf entry lets an app "execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges," and four entries, in autofs, copyfile, CoreServices and the kernel, are Gatekeeper bypasses. The Sequoia page adds an ImageIO entry, "Processing an image may lead to arbitrary code execution," that is not on Tahoe's. Neither page lists WebKit; those fixes come as Safari 27, a separate update for Sequoia and Tahoe released the same day with six entries of its own.

Who this update is for

Golden Gate requires an Apple silicon Mac, and Apple's compatibility list for Tahoe still carries four Intel models: the MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019), the MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports), the iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020) and the Mac Pro (2019). For those, 26.7 is the road from here, as we said in our September 9 tip on the Intel Mac after Golden Gate. MacRumors puts the audience as "users with older Macs or those who don't yet want to update to Golden Gate."

How long the road runs, Apple does not say. Oakley writes that Tahoe is "starting its first two years of security-only support" and Sequoia "its final year," and that Sonoma is now unsupported; Apple's security releases page lists no Sonoma update on September 14; the newest macOS Sonoma entry is 14.8.9 of August 6, and the Safari 27 line names only Sequoia and Tahoe. The pattern is old. Apple agreed to keep patching Jaguar after Panther shipped, as our November 2003 note on the promise recorded, and Panther was still getting patches when our November 2007 note on Security Update 2007-008 called it the likely end of the line, with Leopard out and Tiger the previous release.

What to do now

Open System Settings, click General, then Software Update. If Software Update offers Golden Gate as well, choosing 26.7 keeps you on Tahoe with the 149 fixes it shares with Golden Gate, by our count. Oakley notes that the Apple silicon boot firmware moves to 20457.1.29 in all three releases, so an Apple silicon Mac staying on Tahoe gets the same firmware as one moving up. Install Safari 27 with it; the WebKit fixes are there, not in 26.7. The details of what Golden Gate itself changes are in our September 15 report on macOS 27.

We will post a hands-on report once we have installed 26.7 on an Intel Mac. A hundred and fifty fixes for a Mac from 2019 or 2020 is the better half of the Intel bargain; take it.