[dofm]

I think it is fully likely that Apple will extend the life of the M1 in OS support terms because of this problem.

They don't have much choice but to phase out Intel support, but they absolutely can make the choice to extend support for anything they make themselves, and they may well judge that deciding not to abandon support for the more price-sensitive to tide them over is worth the extra engineering cost.

I personally will work on the assumption one more price rise is coming this year.

[SoftTalker]

They can "make the choice" to continue Intel support also. It's not like they don't know what chips they used and have all the insider NDA info about them.

[matthewfcarlson]

It's a pretty huge cost to support an entirely different set of hardware with different kernel extensions and an entirely different build (x86 instead of arm64e). Could apple choose to do that? Absolutely. But the cost of supporting an M1 is very different than the cost of supporting Intel.

[dofm]

Yeah. I also meant that this is an inflexion point with Apple Intelligence at the OS level.

I suspect you cannot simply sprinkle AI functionality through an OS and manage the difference between unified and non-unified VRAM without noticeable tradeoffs.

The marginal impact of adding some tiny amount of foundational model use to an existing app function is very different between the two.

More so if you want to augment some existing functionality with model use, more so still if you were going to replace some functionality with model use (which I suspect is not yet happening).

You could do it if you were not concerned about surfacing the RAM/VRAM implications to the user through seemingly arbitrary clashes (worse graphics performance or not being able to use the GPU to process some video because you have the larger foundation model loaded, or an AI function refusing to run because another task has booked a lot of VRAM).

But Apple tend to be concerned about surfacing that sort of internal concept. Going forward with Apple Silicon alone means a bunch of questions like that simply don't come up.

[SoftTalker]

I wasn't implying that new releases of the OS and new software that depends on new hardware would be made to work on the old hardware. I interpreted "extend support for anything they make themselves" to mean keeping it updated with bug/security fixes and generally usable as it was when it was purchased. I don't find the fact that they made it themselves vs purchased it from Intel to be a big factor in that decision.

[dofm]

Right but I said nothing about bug fixes, which we'll continue to receive for some time.

I have an Intel machine that Tahoe already doesn't support and I gather I am going to get patches and new Safari until at least autumn 2027, when it will be nine years old.

Apple appear to have said that Intel machines that Tahoe _does_ support, at least, will get patches until the end of 2029.

ETA: I see what you mean about my saying "what they make themselves" which I happily concede was woolly word choice (it is very very hot here in the UK today), but I still think this makes sense to say; they can make decisions about future changes to their own architecture that are either more or less likely to obsolete the M1, and more importantly, most of the architectural decisions that might affect OS support will bring the M1 along with it (modulo some stuff affected by the distribution of the ANE processors).

A lot has changed in the tech world since the last Intel Mac; there is nothing they can now do to change the outcome for those machines.