WatchOS 27 Drops Five Apple Watch Models in Largest Cut Ever
What You Need to Know
- Apple Watch drops five models in single update, unprecedented cut affecting Series 8 and first Ultra.
- IPadOS 27 removes five devices, including 2020 iPad 8th generation after roughly five years support.
- MacOS 27 ends Intel Mac support entirely, retiring 2020 iMac and last Intel MacBook Pro models.
- IOS 27 drops no iPhones, allowing iPhone 11 with A13 Bionic to survive another software cycle.
Apple’s biggest software cull in years lands hardest on the Apple Watch, where five models lose support in a single cut. That has never happened before across one watchOS generation. Previous drops removed one or two models at a time; this fall, anything without an S9 or S10 chip is out, including the first Apple Watch Ultra and the still-recent Series 8 from 2022.
The iPad situation is nearly as aggressive. iPadOS 27 raises the floor to A14 Bionic or M1, dropping five devices at once after last year’s update cut only one. The iPad 8th generation launched in 2020, so some owners are losing major software support after roughly five years, which is on the shorter end of Apple’s typical window for that product line.
The Intel Mac Era Officially Closes
macOS 27 ends Intel Mac support for the four machines Apple carried into last year’s release. Apple telegraphed this in 2024 when it said macOS Tahoe would be the final Intel release, so the cut itself is not a surprise. What is worth sitting with is the timeline: the 2020 iMac and the last Intel MacBook Pro are being retired after roughly five years of software support, which is consistent with how Apple treated earlier Intel hardware.
The Apple TV cuts are comparatively minor. The 2015 Apple TV HD and the first-generation 4K from 2017 are gone, leaving only the second and third-generation 4K models supported under tvOS 27.
iOS 27 is the outlier in all of this: no iPhones are dropped, which means the iPhone 11 with its A13 Bionic chip survives another cycle. If Apple’s system-level decisions follow the pattern set by the Watch and iPad this year, the A13 generation may be living on borrowed time heading into 2026. Devices losing support will still receive security patches for roughly a year under the previous OS version, but new features require new hardware.
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