- When will their toolset drop support for compiling for Intel / x86_64?
- When will they drop Rosetta2?
Compiling/delivering universal binaries is something that as a developer, especially for some markets, you’d like to keep. meaning we try to support older Macs as possible.
For Rosetta2, it might be less needed with all apps transitioned, but for developers using containers, it might be more important to have Intel based containers for a longer period.
• Rosetta will remain available as a general-purpose tool through macOS 27 to help developers migrate their Intel apps, with limited gaming-focused functionality continuing beyond that timeframe
• Intel-based Macs will continue receiving security updates for 3 years following macOS Tahoe
• After the general Rosetta support ends, Apple will maintain a subset of Rosetta functionality specifically for older unmaintained gaming titles that depend on Intel-based frameworks
Apple killing gaming on their platform again, like they did with the 32->64 bit transition...
No, "new" ports to arm of 5 year old games sold at full price as app store exclusives don't count...
Says the Ars Technica article about this topic.
Doesn't sound like Wine at all to me...
This is is great to hear, but even 3 years are probably not enough. 2020-made computers should be used 5+ years more.
Most of the games I have from Steam/GoG on my M1 Mac are running through Rosetta2 ... and that probably won't change in the future.
It seems like dropping Rosetta2 is yet another way for Apple to murder their own relevancy for any kind of gaming... despite ok hardware.
The problem with all MacBook after my generation is their keyboard sucks. They have some variant and tiny improvement every year but it still sucks. The 1.5mm key travel is about the minimum I could take. Both butterfly and new scissors, despite giving them time I never quite come to terms with it.
But I guess this is one more year of macOS and perhaps two more for Safari + security. 2028 will be the final deadline.
That said, keyboards are personal preference, so I wish you luck in finding a good replacement. I also quite enjoy current ThinkPads.
This actually reminded me a study 40% of people can't tell the difference between Coca Cola and Pepsi. And then some 30% can taste the difference but can't tell which is which, 10% can tell but don't have preference.
I guess I am in the extreme minority. You could blindfold me and I could tell you by typing which keyboard is which. And this is not to brag but I much rather I don't have these high standard. Life would be a lot happier.
So the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro and the 2020 13-inch MacBook Pros got non-butterfly keyboards.
But the 2015 keyboards are still superior.
If I remember correctly the current Thinkpad should have the same key travel distance as my MBP / old scissors.
But new scissors definitely have better key stability, something carried forward from butterfly ( although not as good as butterfly ). And for people who have preference with key stability it is a better choice.
But I never update the OS because I don't want to deal with anything that might break my environment.
The performance improvement on the m1+ just make it a no brainer for me though even if I hated the keyboard I'd carry around an external one just for the extra power.
Make no mistake - most of these devices won’t be used as pdf readers - they will end up in the landfill. This is part of the business model, and we + the environment pay for it.
This should be possible with computers too.
Your average PC build will be completely outdated after ~5 years, suffer some type of hardware failure, or have nearly all of it's software (BIOS, OS, drivers) dead and unsupported by then. It is then only usable by enthusiasts / developers, and ends up in a landfill otherwise.
They haven't released a new Intel-based product / product-line since August 2020, and haven't shipped any new units of the same criteria since June 2023.
While new versions of macOS will not be available to them, macOS Tahoe will almost certainly EOL in 2028. That means their Intel-based devices will have a lifetime anywhere from 5 to 8 years at worst, depending on your time of purchase.
Maybe I'm just used to this at this point, but I think this is pretty reasonable.
That still leaves a perfectly adequate machine for most common uses.
At what point do you think this becomes ridiculous? Like are we angry they're not still supporting PowerPC? Would three more years have made a difference to you? 5 more? 10 more? What's the magical number would have made you happy here?
Intel laptops are sooooo slow. So extremely painfully slow. They’re quite bad. I’m largely a windows users, but my god old Intel laptops are bloody awful. Leaving behind old and bad things isn’t bad.
Besides, an older Intel MacBook will continue to work in its current form. It doesn’t need another 10 years of updates.
Netbsd manages to support PowerPC somehow... So yeah maybe they still should. They certainly have the money to do so.
For example, I have a 3rd gen Intel Xeon that runs circles around regular newish processors in brute processing force (think compiling and such). Yet, MS doesn't officially support it anymore with win11. I know you can circumvent the TPM requirement, which I do, so I'm still using it, but this just shows how arbitrary this limit is.
In Apple's case, at least they can say it's a different architecture and whatnot.
Some resellers still have them in inventory, at least I came upon one a few weeks ago.
That makes it a 3 yrs EOL situation. Pretty terrible considering the prices of these devices.
At least the notorious Chromebooks were sold super cheaply (notorious for their non-existent update policies) - not the case here
They were also still being sold by Apple the last time I bought a MacBook pro, which was around 2022 iirc
As long as we can install linux on it, they can drop support. I don't care a single bit
- Not being able to install debian on M3/M4 has been the only thing that keeps me from retiring that machine, I'd rather keep changing broken components and batteries, because even though moving away from x86 is the right thing to do from an efficiency point of view, we don't have an open standard between manufacturers so their ARM chip, and every other ARM chip, are effectively a proprietary architecture in which the customer ultimately lose because he has no control on its own hardware
> is ultimately unnecessary—and it would lead to a lot of good hardware ending up in landfills.
So this didn't need to happen at all
() I’m aware of Asahi Linux, but that is not what I run.
I'm generally not a fan but hell, that's peanuts
Got mine for $460
Also 2020 is the last Intel models. Late 2025 is the Tahoe release, and then you get 3 years of updates, meaning a total of 8 years of software updates for that 2020 machine.
Thats all pretty standard levels of software support, and again, it won't suddenly stop working in 2028.
Less arduous than gutting an iMac to turn it into a standalone monitor but seems highly likely the latency would feel annoying.
I will not care about a multi trillionaire company's bottom line.
Projects like NetBSD are innovative because they work on all devices.
While Apple hardware is innovative because its cutting edge, MacOS is mid at best.
Also hopefully all the special-case handling for 'managed resources' can be dropped (but I guess that would also imply no longer supporting any external non-Apple GPUs).
I'm actually looking forward to a 3D-API that can fully focus on a single GPU architecture that's developed side-by-side with its 3D API - it will be a nice testing ground of what the future of 3D APIs could look like.
- Tahoe-supporting Intel Macs will get full access to all the new features, and they'll still get security updates for the next three years.
- By 2028, they'll be out of the Apple ecosystem.
- Intel-powered Macs that will support Tahoe include the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, the 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro, the 2020 27-inch iMac and the 2019 Mac Pro.
mdp2021•5h ago
# The Exit Strategy // After two decades, Apple has announced its final version of MacOS for Intel. Guess that means Hackintoshing is done, too