iOS 27 Keeps Every iPhone, But 16 Other Apple Devices Lose Support This Fall

iOS 27 Keeps Every iPhone, But 16 Other Apple Devices Lose Support This Fall

When Apple confirmed that iOS 27 would run on the same 31 iPhone models as iOS 26, all the way back to the 2019 iPhone 11, the immediate read was that Apple had quietly become more generous with software longevity. That read is wrong, or at least incomplete. iPhone support held steady because iPhone is the device Apple cannot afford to make anyone feel bad about buying. Everywhere else in the lineup, the calculus was different, and Apple cut deeper this year than it has in years.

Across watchOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate 27, and tvOS 27, Apple ended software support for 16 devices this fall. The Apple Watch saw what MacRumors accurately called the most sweeping cull in the product's history, three full launch generations wiped from the compatible list in a single update. iPadOS 27 dropped five models in one of its most aggressive prunings to date, deep enough that Apple's own initial documentation confused tech outlets covering it. macOS Golden Gate finally closed the door on Intel Macs, a move telegraphed a year ago but still consequential for anyone who didn't get the memo. Only tvOS saw a comparatively mild trim, and only HomePod and visionOS escaped untouched entirely.

The pattern across all of it: iPhone is the flagship that gets the long tail of support, because it's the product Apple sells in volume to people who don't think about chips or generations. Everything else, the categories with smaller install bases and tighter relationships to the new Siri AI's processing requirements, got cut according to a much harder logic. Here's the full breakdown, category by category, with the device-by-device support tables to match.

iPhone: The One Category That Didn't Move

iOS 27 supports exactly the same hardware as iOS 26. Every iPhone from the iPhone 11 forward, including both generations of iPhone SE that qualify, carries over without exception. That's not a minor footnote. Apple had reportedly weighed dropping the aging A13 Bionic devices, the iPhone 11 line and the second-generation SE, and chose not to.

The asterisk is Apple Intelligence, which has its own much narrower hardware floor that has nothing to do with whether a device can install iOS 27 at all.

Supported by iOS 27 (no exceptions, every model below also ran iOS 26):

Not supported by iOS 27: iPhone XS, XS Max, XR, and anything older.

The split that matters for most readers isn't whether their phone updates, it's whether it gets Siri AI at all, and then whether it gets the version of Siri AI that actually runs the heavier on-device models. That second tier is currently limited to the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air.

watchOS 27: The Steepest Cut Apple Has Ever Made to the Watch

This is the headline. watchOS 27 requires an S9 or later chip, and that single requirement erases three entire watch generations in one release. Apple Watch Series 6, 7, and 8 are gone. The second-generation Apple Watch SE is gone. The original Apple Watch Ultra, a $799 flagship that's only about three and a half years old, is gone too.

There was a moment of real confusion around this list immediately after the WWDC keynote. Apple's own preview page initially omitted the Apple Watch Series 9 from the compatible devices list, which several outlets reported as fact before Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac that the omission was an error and that Series 9 is fully supported, just without the newer Apple Intelligence features that require an S10 or later chip. The corrected, final list is below.

Supported by watchOS 27:

Dropped by watchOS 27:

The Ultra cut is the one that stings. Apple has never positioned the Ultra as a disposable product, the pricing and marketing both lean hard into longevity and durability for outdoor and endurance use. Losing major OS support after one generation undercuts that pitch directly, regardless of whether the underlying S8 chip genuinely can't handle whatever Siri AI needs to run locally.

iPadOS 27: The Broadest Cut, and the One Apple's Own Reporting Got Wrong First

If watchOS took the deepest single cut, iPadOS 27 made the widest one. Five models lost support across four different product lines at once: the iPad Air (3rd generation), the iPad Pro 12.9-inch (3rd generation), the iPad Pro 11-inch (1st generation), the standard iPad (8th generation), and the iPad mini (5th generation). For comparison, iPadOS 26 dropped exactly one device the year before.

This is also the platform where the compatibility list itself briefly became the story. In the hours after WWDC, at least one major outlet reported that iPadOS 27 raised its floor to the M2 chip, which would have meant the 4th-generation and 5th-generation iPad Air, both still extremely common devices, lost support entirely. That account was wrong. Apple's actual requirement is the A14 Bionic chip or M1 or later, which keeps both of those Air models on the list. The confusion traced back to Apple's own generational naming: it didn't start tying iPad Air generation numbers to chip names until the M2 model, so anyone reading "iPad Air, 4th generation and later" without already knowing the chip history could misread which generation that boundary actually falls on. The table below reflects the corrected, confirmed requirement.

Supported by iPadOS 27:

Dropped by iPadOS 27:

The genuinely strange part of this list, and the thing forum threads kept circling back to in the days after the announcement, is the inconsistency in how Apple drew the line. The base iPad 9th generation, running the A13 Bionic chip from 2019, the exact same chip in the iPhone 11, remains supported. Meanwhile the original M1 iPad Air, a $599 device from 2022 running silicon that's objectively more capable, very nearly didn't make the cut in early reporting and only survived because the reporting was wrong, not because Apple changed course. Apple drew its actual iPadOS 27 floor at A14 or M1, which means the M1 iPad Air does clear the bar. But the fact that so many outlets, and so many of Apple's own longtime readers, expected it to be cut says something about how unpredictable Apple's iPad support windows have become relative to the iPhone's now-totally-predictable one.

macOS Golden Gate 27: The Expected End of an Era

Unlike the Watch and iPad cuts, this one came with a year of advance notice. Apple said when it shipped macOS Tahoe that Tahoe would be the last version to support Intel processors, and macOS Golden Gate makes that official. Every Mac that can run Golden Gate is Apple silicon. There's no ambiguity and no late correction needed here, just a closing door that Apple told everyone about in advance.

Supported by macOS Golden Gate 27 (Apple silicon only):

Dropped by macOS Golden Gate 27 (the last four Intel Macs):

Four machines fall off the list, all of them Intel. None of this should surprise anyone who's been paying attention since 2020, but it's still the formal end of a five-year transition, and it means Boot Camp is gone along with it. Owners of those four Intel models aren't cut off from security patches immediately, Apple has historically continued issuing fixes for the prior OS version for some time after a cycle ends, but they're done receiving new macOS features for good.

tvOS 27 and HomePod: The Quiet Corners

tvOS 27 drops the Apple TV HD from 2015 and the first-generation Apple TV 4K from 2017, leaving only the second- and third-generation Apple TV 4K models supported. It's a modest cut by this cycle's standards, the kind of trim that would have been the year's biggest story in a calmer cycle and barely registers next to what happened to the Watch and iPad lines.

HomePod is the real outlier. Every HomePod model, including the original from 2018 running the same A8 chip that powered the iPhone 6, gets HomePod Software 27 without exception. visionOS 27 is similarly uneventful: both Vision Pro models, the original M2 version and the M5 refresh, are supported, which isn't much of a statement given there have only ever been two Vision Pro models to begin with.

The Shape of the Cycle

Line all of this up and a clear hierarchy falls out. iPhone support didn't move because Apple can't risk a single first-time buyer feeling burned, and the iPhone is still the product carrying the company. The Watch took the hardest hit because Siri AI's processing demands collided with a product line that, until now, had never gone through a generational cull this severe. The iPad took the widest hit because the iPad has always had the messiest, least predictable support windows in the lineup, and this year just made that reputation worse, with naming confusion serious enough that even outlets that cover Apple for a living got it wrong on the first pass before correcting it. The Mac transition closed exactly on schedule. The categories nobody's emotionally attached to, Apple TV and HomePod, took no more than a glancing trim.

None of this is really about chip horsepower, even though chip horsepower is the official explanation every time. It's about which products Apple is willing to let feel disposable. The iPhone isn't one of them. This year, increasingly, almost everything else is.

Compatibility details reflect Apple's confirmed device lists as of June 2026 ahead of the public release of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate 27, watchOS 27, and tvOS 27, expected this September.