If you’re curious about testing out MacOS 27 Golden Gate beta but you aren’t ready for the full commitment of installing it as your primary operating system, the simplest and safest way to run MacOS 27 Golden Gate beta is within a virtual machine. While one of our authors dove right into MacOS 27 Golden Gate beta full time out of frustration with Tahoe, running a beta operating system has some risks and stability issues associated with it, so that’s not always a viable solution. In situations like this, a virtual machine is particularly helpful.

Virtual machines are great because they’re self-contained and segregated from the rest of your files and host Mac operating system, meaning there’s no chance anything in the VM, beta or not, can break anything else on the Mac. This offers a nice way to test out new beta MacOS features and functionality without any risk to your main Mac. And when you’re done, or no longer use the VM, you can just delete it.

We’re going to walk through the steps for making a MacOS 27 Golden Gate virtual machine by using the VirtualBuddy VM app. VirtualBuddy is easy to use, free, and handles the downloading of necessary MacOS 27 assets directly within the app as part of the VM setup. This makes it so you don’t have to seek out and download MacOS 27 IPSW and installer files on your own, or deal with any additional steps. The result is that setting up a new VM is super easy with VirtualBuddy. Yes there are many other virtualization apps out there, many of them are great too, but for our purposes here we are using VirtualBuddy. You will also need the host machine to be a MacOS 27 compatible Mac, which includes basically any Apple Silicon Mac (MacOS 27 does not support Intel chips).

1. Update to macOS Tahoe 26.6 (or later) before going any further
2. Download from Apple the “Device Support for macOS 27.0 beta” and install that, it is necessary to be able to setup a MacOS 27 VM
3. Grab VirtualBuddy from Github if you don’t have it already, and install that on your Mac too
4. Open VirtualBuddy and choose to create a new MacOS virtual machine
5. Select “macOS Golden Gate” from the list, and then select the latest developer beta build, and choose “Continue” *
6. Go with the default settings (12GB RAM, 64GB virtual storage), or configure the VM as desired and click Continue
7. VirtualBuddy will download the relevant IPSW file and begin installing MacOS 27 within the VM, this is just like any other system install so let this process complete
8. When the VM is finished being created, choose to boot it by double-clicking the VM and pressing the play button
9. You’ll now be walking through the standard macOS Golden Gate setup process, just like you would if this were a brand new Mac being setup
10. When finished with the standard MacOS setup process (language selection, account creation, settings, etc), you’ll soon be presented with the standard MacOS Welcome screen, and using MacOS 27 Golden Gate in the virtual machine

And there you go, now you can experience MacOS 27 Golden Gate on your Mac right now, self-contained within a virtual machine, where you can launch it and quit just like any other app. Performance on Mac VMs are quite good, though it’s not quite as good as running the OS natively obviously. You can update MacOS 27 beta within the VM just like normal, it’s a fully functioning installation of Golden Gate.

If you end up enjoying the beta with the VM enough that you feel comfortable diving all the way in, be sure to backup your Mac first, and then you can install the MacOS 27 beta at any time.

* Note: If you see red text saying “Device support update required” and you can not proceed with installation, you need to go back to the second step and download “Device Support for MacOS 27 beta” from the Apple developer site, install that, then relaunch VirtualBuddy.

For the best performance with a virtual machine, you’ll want to have a good amount of RAM on your host Mac. Do not expect great performance with limited RAM. For example, my Mac has 24GB RAM and I allocate 12GB RAM to the VM, and MacOS 27 VM’s perform well.

Have you installed or run MacOS 27 Golden Gate in a virtual machine? What do you think of the experience?