macOS Golden Gate
macOS Golden Gate deserved a wallpaper inspired by its namesake.
Apple announced the next version of macOS at its annual developers conference this past week, introducing macOS Golden Gate. But one thing was suspiciously absent from the beta: a wallpaper inspired by the operating system’s namesake. Instead, we got a much more muted, abstract grey-blue-taupe wallpaper designed to unify all the platforms. It’s fine enough, but a proper Golden Gate wallpaper it is not.
The new unified wallpaper of OS27 across Mac, iPadOS, and iOS.
So I set out to right that wrong.
Using Apple’s previous California wallpapers as inspiration, I tried to generate something that felt like it belonged with the OS. What came back was a good start, but in usual AI fashion, the devil was in the details. The trusses were a mangled mess, the cables were hallucinated nonsense, and the longer I looked, the more oddities I found.
Left: the original generated image.
Right: the final version after upscaling, editing, denoising, and cleanup.
So I spent a bunch of time polishing it into something I felt comfortable sharing. That included various stages of upscaling, denoising, refining, colour editing, and more.
It may still be, as the kids say, AI slop. But it’s AI slop I spent a lot of time trying my hardest to make look as good as I possibly could. Enjoy.
