End of days: Intel Macs - for whom the bell tolls.

[Herdfan]

That said, if you're running (at that point), say 10 year old hardware the most recent OS is probably going to run like shit anyway...

Solid state drives hide a multitude of issues.

Running an 8 year old (Late 15) iMac and it still hums right along.

Was hoping for a 27” M(X) iMac, but may end up with a Studio and monitor.

 

[Colstan]

My bet is apple will drop support when intel drop support, so probably the last release of macOS that supports intel will be the one where the 9900 series is EOL in the following year.

The next on the chopping block would Coffee Lake, featured in most of the remaining Intel Mac models. I see little reason for Apple to continue to support Intel CPUs which the manufacturer no longer supports, particularly for a lame duck architecture.

I often hear the argument that customers who purchased an Intel Mac mini or Mac Pro earlier this year aren't getting proper long-term support from Apple, but these folks had to know what they were getting into when buying one. Also, just because you spend a lot on a Mac Pro, doesn't mean that you deserve longer support than any other customer.

A Mac loses support based upon the date it was released, full stop. Deprecate x86, priority one, all other priorities rescinded. That's why I always replace my old Macs with a day one release, in order to get the maximum useful lifespan out of it.

Yeah, the number of Hackintosh users out there is pretty small and there is enough pain running one that I'd say running one is as much an entry drug (this would be great if it everything actually worked!)

I'm living proof of that. After Steve Jobs announced the switch to Intel, I put OS X on my custom PC, back in the day, before "Hackintosh" was coined. I got to play around with this strange niche operating system, and bought my first Mac mini a few months later. Had the Mac stayed on PowerPC, then I would have never switched, because I couldn't have played around with OS X.

Oddly enough, I bought a PPC Mac mini, despite knowing about the transition. A mistake I then repeated by replacing it with a 32-bit Core Duo Mac mini. I've been far more deliberative and cautious about what Macs I plan to buy, now that I understand Apple's methodology better. Despite historical patterns, you'd need a degree one step above Kremlinology to begin to divine the fruit company's plans.

 

[throAU]

Solid state drives hide a multitude of issues.

Running an 8 year old (Late 15) iMac and it still hums right along.

Was hoping for a 27” M(X) iMac, but may end up with a Studio and monitor.

They hide some issues, however fire up a FaceTime (or Zoom, etc.) call on a 2020 MacBook Air (or earlier portable machine for example) and see how bad the fan noise is. The GF did this with my old 2020 Air I palmed off to her when I got my 2021 14" Pro... god damn... fan noise.

 

[throAU]

I'm living proof of that. After Steve Jobs announced the switch to Intel, I put OS X on my custom PC, back in the day, before "Hackintosh" was coined. I got to play around with this strange niche operating system, and bought my first Mac mini a few months later. Had the Mac stayed on PowerPC, then I would have never switched, because I couldn't have played around with OS X.

Myself, sort of in reverse. When Mac went intel I tried a Mac Mini (also a 32 bit core duo, lol) thinking I could run something else on it if I didn't like macOS.

Then I tried to build a Hackintosh out of my desktop PC. Ended up just buying Macs for Mac things, and my desktop PC (Ryzen 5900X + Radeon 6900XT) is probably the last one I'll build at this point.

 

[Yoused]

timeline of OS support

I did not try to figure out what various Intel models were EoLed at which point, because that was too difficult. I know my mother's, what, 10-y/o iMac is stuck at Catalina.

 

[theorist9]

Ars Technica did a full analysis of when it's likely that Apple will drop support for Intel Macs.

How long will the last Intel Macs be supported? macOS Sonoma gives us some hints

Nearly 20 years of data show how Intel Macs are faring as Apple switches chips.

arstechnica.com

Reading the comments on the article, this one from someone who claims to be a former Apple employee is illuminating:

".... The other problem with supporting old machines is that you need a supply of old machines to test the software on. If they have been out of production a while you can’t exactly just buy them new from Amazon, or get them in bulk from eBay. Apple doesn’t make them...."

Happened upon this thread again. Thumbs up for the article link--those bar graphs showing years of support were nice. I particularly liked that they calculated the averages based on both the model introduction date and model discontinuation date, as well as based on both active updates with the current OS and security-only support. Thus they covered all four combinations. It woud have been nice if they added range bars, though.

But the comment from the claimed Apple employee doesn't add up for me. He's speaking as though they need to actively source older machines for testing if they want to continue to support them in the next OS, and finding these is a challenge. That doesn't make sense, since the very fact that these machines are currently supported means Apple does have them. The only way they wouldn't is if they made a decision to actively dispose of them. And it not like Apple has so many Mac models that storage space would be an issue on the Cupertino campus.

[Remember the decision being made is whether to continue support for machines that are supported now, not whether to add support for even older machines not currently supported.]

And then the employee says this:

"Dropping machines is really just recognition that Apple doesn’t have the engineering bandwidth to support therm. Apple still runs incredibly (too) lean on engineering and supporting these things would mean that other bugs and security issues don’t get fixed. ."

OK, but historically they've supported Macs going back 6-7+ years even when they were a much smaller company and sold nearly as many different SKU's. So why would it suddenly be a challenge for them to support a large test cluster now when they were able to support a similarly large test cluster when the Mac division was much smaller?

I'm not saying there aren't engineering reasons for Apple to want to reduce its support duration, but this person's arguments have too many holes.

Something like this would have made more sense to me:

"MacOS has become so large and complex that it takes many more person-hours per SKU to verify support than it used to, and this increases every year. Even with that, Apple could probably have maintained its 6-7+ year support history, because the Mac division is much larger and thus has substantially more resources than it used to. However, that's not possible when you add the complexity of supporting two different architectures. Thus, for the transition, Apple will likely have to reduce its years of support temporarily. Once everything is purely on AS, it should be able to re-extend years of support back to historical levels."

 

[theorist9]

We should be getting our first test of the betting pool on on June 10*, when Apple will likely let us know whether MacOS 15 (Sonoma +1) will run on Intel Macs.

[*The next vers. of MacOS should be announced at WWDC, along with a list of compatible devices.]

 

[Yoused]

whether MacOS 15 (Sonoma +1) will run on Intel Macs

The cut-off line will most likely be 2019+ models, which may or may not be supported in the next macOS. Naturally, there will be hackintoshers who can make it run, sort of, on a 2012 Mac.