macOS Tahoe signals that the end is near for Intel Macs, dumping all but four models
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They just announced at the Platforms SOTU that Tahoe will be the last to support Intel Macs.
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I can't. I can run the latest versions of Visual Studio and Android Studio on Sandy Bridge (2011) machines running Windows 10. Tying Xcode to the operating system version is either very, very lazy or a means to push developers to not hold on to machines for too long (probably a mix of both).
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Personally I deliberately was a buyer of the top end intel 2020 air because I wasnt sure how smooth the rollout of the ARM machines would be, while it was super smooth I have no regrets about my decision, it served me well and I picked up an M4 air earlier this year in anticipation of them dropping more intel support this year.
5 years (really nearly 6 given those machines were released march 2020 and MacOS 26 wont be fully released until sept or oct 2025) of full support and then an additional 2 or 3 years of security updates isnt terrible for those machines
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For the (warning pulled from ass statistic ahead) 99% of Mac users that dont install Xcode that isn’t an issue. Xcode is targeted at people developing for the Apple ecosystem, so this isn’t that weird.
If you want clang or gcc then you can do that without Xcode.
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If the developers are forced to use the latest OS, how well do you think they'll support older ones for their apps?
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I wouldnt count it as experimental on M1s or M2s, it’s basically just missing thunderbolt support at this point. I have an M1 mini running Asahi as my primary workstation in my garage workshop and it’s rock solid
Yes, Asahi hasnt caught up to M3s and 4s, but given the context of this thread is “what to do with older machines” and the M4s are brand new and even the M1s are still supported by Apple I dont think that’s relevant.
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Interestingly, I'm not sure it needs to be; Apple developed it in-house didn't they? The reason for pulling Rosetta was that the tech was licensed from Transitive: https://meincmagazine.com/uncategorized/2005/08/5195-2/ - since Apple owns the entire stack here, the only reason for pulling Rosetta2 is to simplify the stack and testing. Considering for Microsoft, the Intel translation layer in Windows ARM is still a major selling point, I can imagine Apple keeping it around for a while. If they don't, then they effectively lose the part of their market that is trying to build/test/run Intel-related stuff, which is MUCH more entrenched than PPC was 20 years ago.
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15.2 supports machines as far back as 2017, so I'm not really seeing that as a big issue. But again, the larger point is that a machine that's not supported by MacOS 26 works just as well at this moment (and for quite a while in the future) as it did before the keynote. It's not suddenly more vulnerable; the software on it hasn't magically stopped working. It's just a workable as it was a few hours ago.
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...it's twelve years old, man.
I don't think it's exactly reasonable to expect a 12-year-old machine to be supported by current software.
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If developers aren't using the latest OS, how well do you think they'll support newer features and architecture?
I know which one I'd consider more important.
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There was probably no way to know it at the time, but if it was an Intel MacBook Air bought around 2020 then that was the last of the mid-2010s Intel generations of Macs that were a very disappointing value for the price. My mom has an Air from that era too, so I can sympathize.
Your wife's Air is not going to be dead. Option 1 is keep using macOS 15 for as many more years as it is supported. After that, Option 2 kicks in: Install OpenCore Legacy Patcher, and then you can continue upgrading macOS on it. I have a 2012 Mac mini still operating as a living room HTPC for the TV. Apple only supports it up to macOS 10.15.7, but OCLP has made it possible to upgrade it all the way to macOS 13. I will move it to macOS 15 eventually because OCLP seems to have stabilized their patches for macOS 15 on that model. So that is a 12-year-old Intel Mac that can still be upgraded today thanks to OCLP.
Mac power users are so glad Intel got kicked to the curb as soon as it was practical. I never want to have to use an Intel Mac again for daily mobile productivity (photo/video editing).
Chances are your wife will feel like she needs new hardware before her current MB Air will truly run out of macOS upgrade potential. When that time comes, the continuing viability of the performance and compatibility of the M1 MacBook Air (2020) bodes well for any Air bought today (currently M4). The Apple Silicon Macs are aging better and more gracefully than the Intel Macs ever did.
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Yes, good answer. Apple's game porting toolkit uses Rosetta2 AFAIK.
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This is a good opportunity to remind that even unsupported macOS releases still get some security updates: XProtect is the mechanism behind Gatekeeper, maintaining a list of signed apps, and blacklisting known malware. Those updates are still getting pushed to systems as old as macOS 11 El Capitan.
To be clear, it does help with low-hanging fruit: The relatively common and easy to infect a Mac is to install an evil pkg, approve it, and bypass Apple's warnings. But the above info doesn't replace patching discovered vulnerabilities in the OS code.
So the advice you'd get from me or anyone here, if you're wondering about using your 3yr+ OS — don't. But Arsians would appreciate the extra information.
The best source on this topic is Howard Oakley:
https://eclecticlight.co/tag/xprotect/
To be clear, it does help with low-hanging fruit: The relatively common and easy to infect a Mac is to install an evil pkg, approve it, and bypass Apple's warnings. But the above info doesn't replace patching discovered vulnerabilities in the OS code.
So the advice you'd get from me or anyone here, if you're wondering about using your 3yr+ OS — don't. But Arsians would appreciate the extra information.
The best source on this topic is Howard Oakley:
https://eclecticlight.co/tag/xprotect/
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If the OS does not support intel, which macOS27, let alone '28 will not, there will be no OCLP for it...
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It may be a while. They are still selling new M1 Airs through Walmart. These aren't grey market, they can still get Applecare.
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Running around my apartment holding my 2020 macbook pro over my head singing we are the champions.
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And they've dropped the price even more from the $700 it was when Walmart first started selling them. I snapped one up at the time worried it was going to be a limited time thing and how fast inventory was selling but no, seems that they're still being churned out fresh for Walmart and presumably corporate accounts/clients.
$649 for a new Apple laptop has to be a record low price even if the machine is rather old at this point
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Shouldn't the question be: if developers aren't using the latest OS and XCode, how well do you think they'll support the current and near future version of the OS for their apps?
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sprocket999
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I'm using a MacBook Air that is just the version before (2017-19 and Intel). The thing runs swimmingly well, yet I can only upgrade to Monterrey (12). So far, I'm still on High Sierra and doing bloody fine. The problem is, Apple's hardware really deserves to keep going longer, as it is so darn well built. I can say the same for the 3 other vario-aging MacBook Pro's here.
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I hope you're right. A quick glance at the Applications list in System Information shows that I'm still running quite a few Intel-only apps. Some of those are old apps I keep around (Divvy is a favorite), and nearly all the games I have installed are Intel only. But plenty of actively-developed apps are still distributed as Intel binaries, especially the ones in the "I use this because work requires it" category (why else would anyone use WebEx?). It's nice that I didn't have to think about this, but maybe that also means developers haven't worried about it either.
I wonder what the space savings might be like when we no longer need universal binaries. I vaguely recall that being significant back in the Snow Leopard era, but binaries probably account for an even smaller share of an application's overall installed size than they did sixteen years ago.
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sprocket999
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Depends what you want to do with it. I have a similar MBA but 264 SSD instead. Everything else the same. I'm in the design biz and run Affinity Design software to create comps for design. This MBA works as smooth as silk. Still running High Sierra too.
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If Apple is constantly breaking backwards compatibility, that's their fault, not the devs.
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And now we know. It's dead for general purpose x86 apps after macOS 27.
Kind of sad when you consider that classic 68k apps ran all the way through Tiger thanks to Classic and the 68k emulator in Mac OS 9 and below
https://meincmagazine.com/gadgets/202...tel-mac-support-and-a-phaseout-for-rosetta-2/
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Sad that the iMac Pro didn't squeak through, but it's just an excuse to finally upgrade.
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Holy crap, I didnt even realize divvy wasnt being maintained anymore, just looked, the release we’ve all been running is 5 years old! I love the app, it replaced spectacle for me, guess now I have to worry about what to replace divvy with eventually
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This is definitely making me wish they hadn’t discontinued target display mode: my 2019 iMac 5k could definitely use a faster CPU/GPU but the display is basically in like-new condition. I’d buy a Mac mini tomorrow if I could use the iMac as a monitor.
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They make conversion kits to gut the motherboard and drive the still great display
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Well to be honest my intel iMac Pro from 2016 still felt very capable till I replaced it with a m4 late last year. It was replaced because the writing was on the wall, not because it was not good enough,
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I’ve already replaced it with an M2 MacBook Air, but I’m still kind of sad to see that I can’t even use it for Boot Camp anymore for those times where I need Windows for a specific piece of software.
I also have an Intel NUC, but since it is a 7th gen i7 it is also not upgradable to Windows 11.
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Hopefully never. It's too useful for docker images that don't have an arm64 version.
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I picked up a brand new 16GB/256GB M2 MacBook Air for $699 when Best Buy did a daily deal shortly after the M4 Air was announced. There’s a lot of deals on the older models if you keep an eye out.
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I get it, I really do... I still have a 2006 MacPro that I fire up occasionally to use a scanner that never got driver updates.
That said, as cool as it is that it still runs, my statement stands; I don't see how any company could reasonably be expected to support 12-year-old hardware. Maybe my perspective is biased by having a whole stable of antique hardware (all the way back to a TRS-80 Model I), but I feel it's my responsibility to keep old stuff running.
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I’m honestly more annoyed at Microsoft not supporting it anymore than Apple dropping support, because old hardware used to get supported by new Windows versions forever. Hardly anything that could run Windows 7 wasn’t upgradable to Windows 10.
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and here I sit using my 13 year old i7-3770 rig that works so well that I am no where near to replacing it. Linux is the best.
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Dude, it lived longer than an entire version of windows. It predated windows 10. Eventually requirements change, and after over 10 years I'd say that' reasonable enough. Nobody was putting windows 10 on a 2008 core 2 duo that ran windows 7 fine. Windows 10 was also a slowdown in major version changes, but if you look day one windows ten looked very different from day last windows 10 as it approaches. A lot changed without making a new full release likeh happened between vista>7>8>10 which launched in pretty rapid succession in about a ten year span. So your computer lived longer than the entire flagship status of multiple versions of windows combined in the end.
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You also have to take into account that the Mac OS X release schedule back then was not yearly, or anything close to it.
2006 First Intel Mac (10.4 Tiger, first released in 2005)
2007 10.5 Leopard
2009 10.6 Snow Leopard
2011 10.7 Lion
So support for physical PowerPC computers lasted through one and a half major OS release, or three years, and the ability to run PowerPC software on Intel hardware lasted through two and a half major releases, or six years.
Once Tahoe releases, we will be at five major releases and five years since Apple Silicon's debut, and there are still four Intel models supported. Even going off of the entirely reasonable assumption those get dropped next year, I think it's unlikely Rosetta 2 gets pulled at the same time. Between those two things, they're actually being a lot less aggressive this go-round.
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I don't think Batmanuel's point is that something running Windows 7 should be able to run Windows 11. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
I believe what they were trying to say is that relatively recent (at the time of Windows 11's release) machines running Windows 10 quite well were deemed incompatible with Windows 11. The cut-off was processors released in 2019 or later, while Windows 11 debuted in 2021. Claiming a three-year-old computer cannot run the new OS is bizarre. Even Apple, which is regularly taken to the woodshed for "planned obsolescence," generally provides five to six major OS releases before putting a device into security-maintenance mode.
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