Light Blue compatibility with macOS 27 Golden Gate and iOS 27

Next week, Apple are going to be releasing major upgrades to macOS and iOS. iOS 27 and macOS 27 Golden Gate are going to be released on 14 September.

We’ve been testing the current versions of our macOS and iOS apps on the prerelease versions of macOS 27 and iOS 27 and haven’t found any issues. However, please read on for our usual health warning about the dangers of installing a major operating system update as soon as it’s available!

Intel / Apple Silicon warning when printing

If you’ve been using macOS 26 Tahoe, you might have noticed that a warning about support ending for Intel-based apps when you print or create a PDF from Light Blue. tl;dr: you don’t need to worry about this, but read on if you’re interested in the details.

Light Blue’s macOS app has been a universal binary that natively supports Apple Silicon since 2022, but a component that we use for creating PDFs and printing is x86-based and requires the Rosetta 2 emulator that’s built into macOS. macOS 27 will still support Rosetta 2 and it will be macOS 28 (which will be released in Autumn 2027) where those will no longer run. We will have a replacement for our x86 printing component before then.

Health warning

As with all major operating system updates, it is a very sensible idea to be cautious about updating your computers until Apple have had a chance to fix some of the bugs that will inevitably be present in macOS 27. Although our testing of Light Blue 2026.1 and 2026.2 on macOS Golden Gate has been positive, there is every chance that Apple could change something that breaks compatibility or that we’ve missed something because we can’t test every conceivable combination of devices and settings.

If you rely on Light Blue to run your business, we would therefore recommend holding off from updating your operating system as soon as macOS 27 is available. At the very least, if you really really want to update on day one, make sure that you have at least one computer on the ‘old’ operating system until you’ve had a chance to test that all of the features that you depend on are fully functional.

Also, please note that our testing has been has been focused on the latest version of our desktop app. All of our subscribers have access to Light Blue 2026.1, and if you’re using an older version of our desktop app then please update to the latest version to ensure that you’re able to take advantage of all of the new features and bug fixes that we’ve been adding. You can update the desktop app by using the ‘Check for updates’ command (in the ‘Light Blue’ menu if you’re on a Mac, or in the ‘Help’ menu if you’re using it on Windows).