Macos Tahoe Incompatible with MAC Studio M3 Ultra

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

lawgimenez

38 points

25 comments

eclecticlight.coTechstory

heatednegative

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Macos TahoeMAC Studio M3 UltraApple QASoftware Compatibility

Key topics

Macos Tahoe

MAC Studio M3 Ultra

Apple QA

Software Compatibility

The latest macOS Tahoe update is reported to be incompatible with some Mac Studio M3 Ultra models, sparking frustration among users and concerns about Apple's quality control.

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01Story posted
Sep 17, 2025 at 6:38 PM EDT
4 months ago
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4 months ago
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Discussion (25 comments)

Showing 25 comments

daft_pink

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months ago

3 replies

Wait, the Mac Studio has worse single core perf than an iPad Pro? that's absurd.

varenc

4 months ago

1 reply

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.

daft_pink

4 months ago

It’s so dumb that their most expensive computer will always be a generation behind

muricula

4 months ago

1 reply

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.

daft_pink

4 months ago

The article says Mac Studio M3 Ultra owners can’t update to macOS Tahoe. So while the lower-end Studio uses M4, the $4k-$10k M3 Ultra Version with all that great RAM for inference still runs M3 Ultra. It’s slower than the iPad Pro released 10 months earlier in single core performance and, for now, according to this article isn’t compatible with macOS Tahoe.

Aurornis

4 months ago

Very high core count CPUs generally have slower single-core performance than their lower core-count counterparts.

Even on the x86 side, if your workloads are primarily single threaded then you will be better served by a consumer CPU than a $10,000 server CPU.

For heavy multi-threaded workloads there is no comparison.

codys

4 months ago

4 replies

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?

wtallis

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months ago

1 reply

Are you implying none of this code existed more than two days ago?

wtallis

4 months ago

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.

coldtea

4 months ago

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).

zitterbewegung

4 months ago

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.

sugarpimpdorsey

4 months ago

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.

charamis

4 months ago

2 replies

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.

DrBenCarson

4 months ago

1 reply

Did you read the post?

charamis

4 months ago

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.

coldtea

4 months ago

>I don't know what does

Something that's not a rare issue affecting some handfuls of users of just a particular model?

Some of the classic releases that are esteemed as "Apple's most well managed and stable", like Snow Leopard, had worse issues than this.

xrisk

4 months ago

actual title: "macOS 26.0 Tahoe build 25A354 is incompatible with Mac Studio M3 Ultra"

TechSquidTV

4 months ago

During the beta at least, inexperienced a ton of crashes

slowmovintarget

4 months ago

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.

jtthe13

4 months ago

Tahoe running fine on my M3 ultra. The only issue on the studio and the laptop was the initial sluggishness that I ended up attributing to the first spotlight indexing. Nothing new then.

fakebizprez

4 months ago

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.

TomaszZielinski

4 months ago

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.

[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256030581

Aurornis

4 months ago

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.

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ID: 45282268Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 2:40:40 PM

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