[asow92]

This machine has me asking why much older hardware can't run newer versions of macOS. The answer of course is Apple needs to sell new machines, but the Neo may be proof that decade old Macs could run Tahoe as well as or better than the Neo.

[sockaddr]

> but the Neo may be proof that decades old macs could run Tahoe, and maybe as well or better than the Neo

The A18 Pro is going to out perform many "decades old" processors, which would you be referring to?

I wouldn't conflate "affordable" with "low-end" in terms of processing speed. Apple is able to get the price to this point because of decisions that the rest of the market did not make.

[asow92]

I think an old Mac Pro quad Xeon with 32gb of ram and an ssd of that era could do it. I agree that most cpus from 20 years ago could not. I understand that doing it and doing it well aren’t the same.

[julienb_sea]

I'm not sure this really makes sense. The single core performance for the iphone chip is leagues ahead of anything even a couple years old. They can likely increase clock speed of the iphone chip in a larger chassis so the performance isn't exactly 1:1 with the 16 pro, which was hardly a slacker. 8gb on apple silicon goes much further than 8gb would have on an intel chip, due to faster and on chip RAM and much faster storage to enable smoother use of swap.

I'd agree that an m1 chip can probably continue to run modern macOS for a very long time, and they will likely drop support for it much earlier than they would need to.

[asow92]

I totally agree on the M1 bit. I just think there are so many capable machines that are unnecessarily scraped when they could be working with up to date software. Sure, they can run modern Linux or windows, but doesn’t that mean they could probably run modern Mac OS in theory as well?

I understand that running for power users and running for my uncle aren’t the same.