I'm curious if there are any decently representative use share stats out there for Mac Intel vs ARM. I tried finding some a while ago and found nothing really conclusive (mostly for niches like developer tools or games - what's the long tail look like?).
Apple generally provides 6-8 years of OS support for hardware. My 6.5 year old 2019 Macbook Pro works fine with macOS 26; macOS 27 will drop support in September 2026; macOS 28 will drop Rosetta Intel support. macOS 26 get updates thru September 2028 at which point all Intel mac hardware will be >8 years old.
I would argue that Steam and Homebrew users are relatively niche portions of the userbase, and that they would be more likely to own newer systems.
Neither statistic comes from a sample group that's more representative of the average user, who is mostly browsing the web and using a handful of undemanding applications, and is therefore less motivated to upgrade for performance reasons.
Maybe for Steam, but my gut instinct is that Homebrew would be the opposite: it would be disproportionately popular among devs who pride themselves on keeping hardware for many years longer than most people. "Yeah, this 2015 MBP isn't great for gaming anymore, but it's fine for running vim!" is absolutely the kind of thing I hear frequently.
I bought an Intel MBP towards the end. No regrets, I had valid reasons.
But the MacOS support at this point is pretty atrocious. I mean, it technically runs, but the OS is clearly designed in a way that ruins performance on this hardware. It’ll run Vim, sure, for 2 hours on battery, hot as hell. At this point, Intel Macs are only fine for running Linux.
We haven't given out an Intel Mac at work (enterprise with 50k users, maybe 1/5th use Macs) in years....I think we might have a handful of people still using one, but it's gotta be 500:1