macOS 13 Ventura dumps all pre-2017 Macs, including the “trash can” Mac Pro
arstechnica.comIt's really disappointing how aggressively they have started to drop macOS support for slightly older Macs.
Big Sur, which was released in Nov 2020, still supported the MacBook Air (2013) and the MacBook Pro (Late 2013). When Ventura is released only two years later, not even the MacBook Pro (2016) is supported, which was sold until Jun 2017. The fact that Ventura even drops support for a Mac that they sold until Dec 2019 (i.e., the "trash can" Mac Pro), is just mind-boggling.
I understand that they want to transition away from Intel Macs as fast as possible, but deprecating these Macs so aggressively is really terrible, both from a sustainability perspective and a consumer perspective.
I still keep a Mac mini (2011) around for guests to use for things that are not particularly sensitive (since it stopped receiving security updates a few years ago). It's not the fasted machine by any stretch, but it is still perfectly fine for watching movies, browsing the web, and anything else that does not heavily tax the CPU.
I agree this is completely unjustifiable, especially with regards to the Mac Pro.
Can these machines even run Linux without losing hardware features (like T2 acceleration?)
The above said, I can see why they want to do it. It makes sense to want to stop supporting Intel macs as early as they can, and that means bringing down expectations of support life every year so it’s not a sudden cutoff that would cause an uproar.
It’s still B/S however you look at it though, and I feel really bad for anyone stuck on these platforms that feel like the rug has been pulled.
And yet it should cause the uproar anyway…
I own a Mac mini (late 2014) and it still run perfectly fine especially when I upgraded its HDD disk to an SSD, it upgraded automatically to macOS 12 Monterey and was hoping it will be able to upgrade to macOS 13 but unfortunately, it seems to be the end..
It’s interesting that this seems like it may happen faster than the PowerPC -> Intel transition, where it took three years after the last PowerPC model was replaced and Snow Leopard stopped supporting PowerPC.
Did OS X have security updates then?
This transition is way slower than PPC to Intel. They had the entire lineup changed by the end of 2006 starting the same year. By 2009 PPC models seemed particularly ancient.
Meanwhile with the current transition Apple has yet to introduce a Mac Pro replacement over a year and a half in.
Isn’t the Studio pretty much a Pro?
If you don't need PCI-E slots and only need 128GB RAM maybe it is. But remember the Mac Pro has a memory ceiling of 1.5TB.
I haven't checked because I don't have a mac but it really depends if they have decided to increase support life and security updates of the previous macos release.
You don't really need Ventura if your current release is supported a long time.
They don't specify any support life or security lifetimes in advance. Typically what they do lately is update the previous two versions with security updates so you get a couple extra years lagging behind. But unlike MS or a lot of Linux distros there is no support promise and no EOL date.
I've got an upgraded 2007 mac mini (core 2 duo or something?) running as a time machine server with uptime of like 5 months. By far the most stable thing we've got at home.
Bit disappointed to see my iMac 2015 dropped.
It's got an i7 running at 4ghz, I paid for the graphics card update to 395x and 32gb of ram.
It still runs everything absolutely flawlessly. I have no plans to upgrade anytime soon. So hopefully will run the OS with a hack, as I don't see what this OS needs better specs for, considering i'm sure lower spec machines can run it, so it's just Apple cutting it off for being Apple.
Else then I hope to still get quite a few years out of this and will just have to deal with not having the latest OS anymore and hope the apps I want/use will continue to run.
Else it's back to Windows 10 for me, via boot camp.
I paid over 2 and a half grand for this machine, I want a longer life out of it particularly is it runs everything so incredibly flawlessly still. It doesn't seem worth it to drop another large amount of cash on a new device, plus Apple don't even do the 27" anymore and i'm not sure I want to lose windows compatibility.
"It still runs everything absolutely flawlessly"... well that's the problem.
Would it be better if Apple release a few ‘security’ updates that cripple it?
> Else it's back to Windows 10 for me, via boot camp.
Amazing longevity if you think about it that way.
But many computers last 7+ years nowadays in compatibility with everything, so that's not really a silver lining.
The main irony to me is that its common for different people to talk about how they are never upgrading their MacOS.
The joke is Apple and its employees think they're a "green" company.
These systems have a lot of life left in them.
They're not flipping a kill switch on these devices. They just won't be running the newest OS. I don't see how these two things (software updates and hardware longevity/recyclability) are at all related.
The main issue is, as the article points out towards the end, that you only receive all macOS security updates if you are on the latest major version. The two major versions prior to that one receive some, but not all, security updates. Once you are three major versions behind, your Mac does not receive any macOS security fixes anymore, which of course is hugely problematic.
So yes, unless you are completely ignoring the security of your system, losing macOS support is a kind of soft kill switch for the hardware.
There's another way which you could see this, which is that the cost of maintaining backward compatibility for every prior piece of hardware only increases the surface area for vulnerabilities to emerge.
Also, if security is your #1 priority you should pay the cost of the upgrade. Monterey is compatible with Macs as old as 2015. That means that Apple will sunset security support for it in 2024. That's nine years of supported life for your computer – not bad.
I have a 2014 Mac that still runs flawlessly.
The problem I've run into is other software/libraries dropping support for older versions of MacOS. So far this is fixable, but it means if you need new features, libraries, or whatever in other, non-Apple products, you might not be able to get it. In these cases, there's nothing functional about the decision, it's just "we're cutting off support here". That is, I could install Linux on my Mac, and run the latest version just fine.
This isn't Apples fault, but the whole thing is sort of ridiculous to me. It puts real pressure on me to upgrade hardware for it's purposes solely because of arbitrary software support cutoff decisions. It would be different if it were "version x needs this hardware feature" but that's not the case.
Not releasing the source leaves you open for vulnerabilities and locks out independent development. So people dump these in favor of new ones but for doing the same thing
They are. Apple always uses it's ecosystem...
As a counterpoint, I have a 2011 MBA that I still use from time to time. It doesn't have half a decade of updates but it does everything that it used to do, just fine. I primarily use it as my no-distraction writing device.
Same here, but using a late 2010 MBA.
Does pre-2017 also mean pre-T1? TFA mentions T2 is "safe", and it was my first thought that anything pre-T1 was being nuked. Too bad they don't mention that at all. 2017-2019 does feel like the T1 era, roughly.
T2 is indeed "safe", but there is not a consistent pattern with regard to T1 and pre-T1 Macs:
The MacBook Pro (2016, 4 Thunderbolt ports, with Touch Bar) does have a T1 chip and is dropped, but the MacBook Pro (2017, 2 Thunderbolt ports, no Touch Bar) does not have a T1 (or T-anything) chip and is still supported in Ventura.
It seems that this eliminates support prior to Kaby Lake. Is there any big difference between Skylake and Kaby Lake? Windows 11 does similar cut.
In the Windows 11 case, I believe the speculation was that they wanted a justification to drop CPUs too old to have the hardware acceleration to blunt the severe performance impact of the virtualization-based security they wanted to implement.
I've run Monterey on my MacBook Pro Mid 2014 since the first betas using OpenCore Legacy Patcher. OTA updates work fine. Never had any issues.
Damn, there goes my 2015 MBP…
Same. This thing still works great for me! I really thought Apple could squeeze one more OS upgrade out of this…
same. my personal mac is still going strong. I even had the battery replaced two years ago
The end of Intel-based Macs is fast approaching.
Yet they still sell them.
Barely. After today's announcement, I believe the only Intel Macs remaining are the Mac Pro and (weirdly) one configuration of the Mac Mini.
Yes. I believe that situation is unchanged from before the announcement, unless I missed something.
Oh, you're right. For some reason I thought the MacBook Pro 13" was replacing an Intel model, but I was wrong.
This may be something of a warning before macOS goes Apple Silicon only.
Consider Apple's transition from PowerPC to x86: the first intel Mac shipped in 2006; in 2008 Apple released Mac OS X 10.6/Snow Leopard which was intel only.
In 2020 Tim Cook said the Apple Silicon transition would take about two years and that Apple would "continue to support and release new versions of MacOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come" - without specifying whether "years" is 2, 3, or more.
I really dislike this behavior from Apple. I had a first generation Mac Pro from 2006 which was able to run OS X 10.11 perfectly fine but officially only supported OS X 10.7. The reason was that this was the only Mac using a 32bit EFI so when they stopped compiling the boot.efi file for 32bit, newer OS X versions couldn‘t boot. Luckily it was quite simple to patch the boot.efi to 32bit.
Use desktop Linux, the only operating system that respects you and the usefulness of the hardware you own by supporting all hardware forever.
Unfortunately this is not a solution for a large majority of people who a) don't know/care what Linux is (which is suspect is an even larger majority of Mac users) or b) know what Linux is but are locked into some piece of proprietary software that only runs on the commercial OSs.
I'm not one to capriciously suggest government regulation but I think there is space somewhere for something that says if you're going to offer a general computing product for sale that you need to provide support for it (in terms of bug and security fixes) for n number of years. 10 years seems appropriate in my non-expert opinion.
I’ve got a 2015 15” Macbook Pro that’s still performing admirably. Anyone know how it works with Linux? Curious about trackpad respnsiveness, media keys, and battery life/heat/performance.
I use Linux on my PC laptops, but I’ve never installed it on a Mac because macOS has always integrated nicely with the hardware. Gestures seem to be a big hurdle.
Not quite... Linux has also deprecated and removed support for processor architectures and devices (though pretty obscure architectures and peripherals such as ISDN controllers) - see https://lwn.net/Articles/769468/
As far as I know, you are free to add them back in whenever you want. Support is removed from the kernel when no one is around to maintain the feature. If a breaking change has to be made and no one steps up to implement it, the support gets dropped.
I suffer from a similar issue. The current magic keyboards that Apple sells require MacOS >= 11.3 while my 2017 iMac is stuck on MacOS 10.15. As a result, the media keys on my new keyboard don't work.
macOS 12.x supports the 2015 (and 2017) iMacs.
Oops; I meant to say 2013 iMac...
Heh. Where is the environment friendliness? Still rocking a 2014 MBP with $50 repairs after a spill that they quoted $1500 to fix. Fucking daylight robbers and goons