macOS Tahoe Incompatible with Mac Studio M3 Ultra
22 comments
·September 17, 2025codys
It seems surprising to me that this kind of basic thing (does the update work on the hardware we've released) wasn't validated by Apple prior to releasing this software update. Perhaps a sign of issues in the QA process at Apple around MacOS?
coldtea
There can be outlier bugs, that only appear for a small subset of users, under certain conditions (from different OEM parts combo among dozens to different software packages installed, update paths followed, or options enabled).
sugarpimpdorsey
You know Microsoft has to deal with all sorts of various hardware configurations as do all the OEMs.
Apple has like 10. All in-house.
You could fit their whole lab in a spare bedroom.
There is no excuse for this.
zitterbewegung
Release candidate was up on the developer site for a week and another comment says that only a subset of people are having the problem . It would seem that the group is some kind of anomaly that never got a release candidate installed also.
wtallis
From what the article says, this is specifically a problem when updating from an OS version released two days ago, to the other OS version released two days ago. That's not exactly the most logical or likely path for most users to take, though obviously Apple needs to be able to handle this going forward for users who are hesitant to update to 26 and want to run 15.7 in the meantime.
sugarpimpdorsey
Are you implying none of this code existed more than two days ago?
wtallis
Of course not. But it makes sense that a bug with a narrower scope is more likely to escape testing, and apparently something that changed between 15.6.1 (released a month ago) and 15.7 (released two days ago) affects the process of upgrading to 26. So whatever code is at fault is probably pretty recent.
TomaszZielinski
A few months ago there was a seemingly similar crash in Sonoma 15.4, on some M1s [1], and AFAIR it was fixed in 15.4.1 ~2 weeks later.
daft_pink
So much for buying a their most expensive model with a slower single core clock speed and slightly worse single core speed than their base model iPad Pro.
tcoff91
Wait, the Mac Studio has worse single core perf than an iPad Pro? that's absurd.
varenc
It's true. It's last generation's M3 based CPU instead of the M4. But the M3 Ultra has 32 cores vs the M4 iPad's 9 or 10 cores.
Apple doesn't make an Ultra version of the M4. The speculation is they'll do this every other generation.
muricula
I could be mistaken, but I think the mac studio comes with either an M3 ultra or an M4 max, and the ipad comes with an M4 chip. I think they decided not to make an ultra for the M4 generation, but don't take my word for it.
xrisk
actual title: "macOS 26.0 Tahoe build 25A354 is incompatible with Mac Studio M3 Ultra"
TechSquidTV
During the beta at least, inexperienced a ton of crashes
charamis
If that does not prove that Apple has been very hasty with this update overall, I don't know what does. The bar for quality control has been set kinda low.
coldtea
>I don't know what does
Something that's not a rare issue affecting some handfuls of users of just a particular model?
DrBenCarson
Did you read the post?
null
charamis
Yes I did, and its comments, prior commenting here. I'm aware that some users managed to upgrade successfully but still that does not change what I believe about this rollout.
slowmovintarget
Oh how I wish Arch or even Asahi supported the current generation of Mac hardware. Great hardware and memory architecture for inference, saddled with Tahoe.
fakebizprez
As someone who owns the M3 Ultra Studio, and has been on the iOS 26 Beta since day 1, I will keep this piece of trash off my machine as long as I can.
Brother Tim Cook's days are numbered.
Title is misleading. Some Mac Studio M3 Ultra users are seeing upgrade failures, but others are not.
The source for this article is an Apple.com discussion forum thread with a couple dozen complaints so far.
Definitely an issue for some, but declaring it "incompatible" is misleading.