1. Apple has been doing this for years and years. At this point, it shouldn't be a surprise.
2. It reduces legacy cruft. The alternative is you get to keep 20-30 year old legacy cruft, as with Windows. I'm not saying what Microsoft does is necessarily bad, just different.
3. The Intel laptops don't stop running[a] -- and if history is any indication, will still receive critical security patches.
4. At least the bonus here is that the lowest end Apple Silicon Mac almost entirely crushes the high end i9 MBP 16" it replaced -- for a fraction of the cost.
a. Unless it gets hit by one of a number of known quality issues (screen, keyboard, battery, etc).
> As far as I know, they keep running with the last supported version of macOS.
During the past 3 years I was forced to upgrade from Mojave to Big Sur to Monterrey, each and every single time because otherwise my 2019 MacBook pro would not be allowed in the network as it was running unsupported OSes.
No, they do not keep running with the last supported version. Having a successful boot sequence and seeing blinking lights is not the end goal of spending over $2k on a luxury computer.
They did that when they moved to Intel also. They always have a hardware philosophy and push the market towards it. You see this in chips, cables, audio jacks, etc. It's just Apple being Apple.
Actually there isn’t an x86 version of the current macOS; it’s a single operating system that runs on multiple processor architectures. During the PowerPC to Intel transition back in the day, I could boot a PowerPC or Intel Mac from the same hard drive.
The same is true today with Intel and ARM-based Macs.
I have a 2017 Intel iMac running macOS Ventura but there’s plenty of ARM code on it. Here’s the output from running the file command on ls:
Apple is still selling the Mac Pro [1], which is Intel based. And there are plenty of Intel Macs for sale on Apple’s refurb store [2].
I suspect these machines will be supported for the foreseeable future.
BTW, my 2017 iMac is running its 7th major operating system:
- macOS 10.12 Sierra
- macOS 10.13 High Sierra
- macOS 10.14 Mojave
- macOS 10.15 Catalina
- macOS 11 Big Sur
- macOS 13 Monterey
- macOS 14 Ventura
I think Apple will support Intel Macs for a good while. They’re not going to get all of the same features as ARM-based Macs (due to these machines having Apple’s custom silicon the Intel Macs don’t have) but they will get the same core features for the foreseeable future.
> Apple is still selling the Mac Pro [1], which is Intel based.
I wouldn't take that as any kind of promise it's gonna be maintained by them for an acceptable amount of time.
Up until last month when they announced the new Apple Watch SE, their entry-level watch was the Series 3 which you could still purchase even though it didn't get updated to watchOS 9. Sometimes they just continue to offer a product because some people might still buy it.
Yeah, still selling the Apple Watch Series 3 wasn’t a good look for Apple, no doubt.
But it’s one thing to sell a $249 watch that won’t get the latest operating system update versus a $6000 Mac Pro. Those customers would be super unhappy if the next operating system doesn’t run on it.
I wonder about that too… Xcode Cloud runs on Intel server hardware [0] - is Apple going to want to build their own ARM server platform or will they just keep x86 alive enough for their internal server workloads?
It is not enough to explain it simply, one should also explain it accurately.
They are still supporting Intel chips from the Haswell generation and later, although as plorkyeran points out, they can now assume AVX2 chip instructions are available, which simplifies things for them.
1. Apple has been doing this for years and years. At this point, it shouldn't be a surprise.
2. It reduces legacy cruft. The alternative is you get to keep 20-30 year old legacy cruft, as with Windows. I'm not saying what Microsoft does is necessarily bad, just different.
3. The Intel laptops don't stop running[a] -- and if history is any indication, will still receive critical security patches.
4. At least the bonus here is that the lowest end Apple Silicon Mac almost entirely crushes the high end i9 MBP 16" it replaced -- for a fraction of the cost.
a. Unless it gets hit by one of a number of known quality issues (screen, keyboard, battery, etc).