macOS Tahoe Incompatible with Mac Studio M3 Ultra (eclecticlight.co)

Apple’s macOS 26.0 “Tahoe” currently fails to install on Mac Studio units with the M3 Ultra chip: users report upgrades from macOS 15.7 aborting late in the process and the machine rebooting back to 15.7. Early investigation points to a problem in the neural engine driver, and a comparison of kernel extensions (kexts) between macOS 15.6 and 26.0 shows several Apple silicon hardware kexts absent in Tahoe — though Apple alone can confirm the exact root cause. Apple is advising affected users to hold off on the Tahoe upgrade until a new build that explicitly supports the M3 Ultra is released. This matters for the AI/ML community because the M3 Ultra’s Neural Engine is a central accelerator for Core ML and other on-device AI workloads; driver or kext regressions can break performance-critical tooling, inference pipelines, and compatibility testing. Developers, researchers, and IT admins who rely on Mac Studio M3 Ultra for model development, benchmarking, or production validation should delay OS upgrades and keep systems on 15.7 to avoid disruption. The incident also highlights how tightly coupled OS releases and silicon-specific drivers/kexts are — a missing or incompatible driver can render the latest OS unusable on new hardware until Apple ships a corrected build.