How long will the last Intel Macs be supported? macOS Sonoma gives us some hints
arstechnica.com> The most likely cause for this decline in support for latter-day Intel Macs is also the simplest one: It's simply in Apple's business interests to do so. Most cynically, if your old Mac gets fewer years of software updates, you have one more reason to buy a new Mac.
At least for me, one of the reasons I buy Apple hardware (e.g. iPhones) is that they’re supported longer than the competition. So I think if Apple are doing the above then it’s short-term thinking.
My Dad bought an 5K iMac in 2017. He just used it for browsing, email and YouTube etc. It works well. Very fast. Fantastic screen. Doesn’t support the new OS coming out in a few months (but presumably will still get security updates to its existing OS for a few years). There is no reason to fill our landfills with powerful machines like that! (I would say I regret telling him to buy a Mac, but Windows 10 will stop getting security updates in a few years too.)
My main issue with apple is the lack of backwards compatibility. They sort of plugged that hole, but I was running mountain lion for a good chunk of time and over time things just stopped working. Mostly internet things like a simple web browser. Whereas, I could run the same programs up into windows 11 and who knows how far into the future.
Unfortunately, at the time, I needed to run legacy programs and apple just left a lot behind.
Simple web browsers stopped working everywhere (android, windows) because the web moved on : root certificate lists, cipher lists, web standards.
I’ve had old tablets and windows installations stop working (as well as macs and ios) for that reason. A new Firefox installations on Windows and Mac got the web working for a while more.
Yeah that's the big rub. Once apple abandoned their 32bit systems so did all the developers including mozilla. I was able to find pale moon. That worked for a time, but even those guys gave up support.
It sucks because perfectly good software just was abandoned almost overnight.
Edit: I'd like to add that I have gotten to a point where I felt comfortable upgrading to apple silicone (3 years in), but now I am experiencing the opposite problem. Where the same develpers were more than happy to drop support overnight; are now slow to develop for the new chipset.
Macs never had particularly long support cycles for their OS.
Windows 10 will have ended up getting 10.5 years of support that isn't bad at all.
Linux.
I don't use it much but I picked up a 16" MBP as I expected to use it as a not-Mac. Use as a Mac is far better on an M1/M2. I already have too many machines inside the house and when I go out, I tend to use my Surface Go m3.
I was just looking into this issue myself, to see how long I'd realistically have to keep shipping chunky universal binaries. I can imagine that Apple drops Intel support in say macOS 16, but keeps patching macOS 15 for a good long while.
I didn't see it pointed out explicitly in the article but it seems that the last major architecture change hurt lifespan for both the old architecture (at some point updates stopped for all old-arch machines) but also for the first few generations of the newer architecture (presumable the hardware was changing quicker so it was harder to keep compatibility).
I find it interesting that the primary factor seems to be if it was easy to maintain support. IIUC there is no public promise of software support lifetime. I wonder if there is an internal minimum, then they continue supporting as long as it is easy to do so?
I think part of that was early Intel machines were also 32 bit or 32 bit EFI machines.
Yes, the first generation Intel Macs had a 32bit CPU.
I bought the original Intel MacBook in 2006, and the last OS update was in 2011 so that wasn't bad. By that time it was already pretty slow due to the limited CPU and memory. That was much longer than you'd expect the Windows equivalent laptop from 2006 to last.
The Core 2 architecture with 64bit support was released in late 2006, and the MacBook updated the same year - less than 6 months after release of the first, so two architectural changes in one year! It's strange Apple didn't just hold off from the initial release for a while.
The last Intel Macs were mind-numbingly expensive - my i9 MBP16 in 2020 was around £4.5K I think - and I would be seriously irritated at not being able to sweat this particular asset, or even sell it on. At least it still boots Windows. Still a good machine, the Touch Bar is a Power user’s dream.
Apple might well have reduced their turnover by making the M1 series too good to need replacing on the same timeframes as the Intel machines - either way, what’s the point of making hardware built to last without the software?
> ...the Touch Bar is a Power user’s dream.
I would say I'm a "power user" and the Touch Bar was the most anti "power user" move Apple has ever made. The first iterations with no physical escape key were atrocious. Then they gave in and brought back the escape key while still keeping the Touch Bar. I've had it on about a half dozen work machines at this point and I'm so sick of it you couldn't pay me to own one as a personal machine. I'm so glad it's finally going away and you can get machines without. The Touch Bar is a prime example of a solution in search of a problem.
I think apple is making a mistake deprecating intel entirely. I want to get an M2 mac but I just can't. I need to work with native X64/amd64 code. And I can't get Linux laptops at work. Macos is the best work OS out there, sucks not being able to use them in the future.
> And I can't get Linux laptops at work
Why not?
Because they said no.
Emulator?
I need to run VMs like with Win10 guest as an example.
Windows for ARM64 runs just fine, and has its own x86 emulation layer.
There are scenarios where you genuinely need Intel hardware (running x86-64 binary drivers, I guess), but it's a pretty small subset.
Debugging x64 apps, malware reversimg and exploit dev are my main use cases. When I looked into it, windows or other OSes only worked on X86. Macos native emulation is useless. I would want to run idapro in windows10 and debug X64 apps.
I still use an intel imac a few times a week to play with the CCL’s cocoa IDE. As intel macs become less stable, that software will die with it. Such a shame.
It is a shame that CCL was never updated to M1/M2 Apple Silicon.
Until recently I had three Common Lisp environments: LispWorks Professional, SBCL, and CCL. When I (mostly) retired I stopped paying for LispWorks and now CCL is off the table also.
I hope you have better luck than I did with CCL’s cocoa IDE and GUI library. I only write the simplest of GUIs. However, CCL is great for development because of fast compilation times and for some reason, file IO is so much faster than SBCL.