saarek

sevenfeet said:

dewme said:

If Apple follows a timeline similar to the one they followed for the PPC to Intel switchover, shouldn’t we expect to see Apple shipping an Apple Silicon only macOS around the 3-year mark, dropping support for Rosetta 2 around the 5-year mark, and obsoleting the last Intel Macs around the 7-year mark?

Following precedent is always a defensible strategy, no matter how badly you feel about the expensive machine you bought three years ago. Power PC Mac owners got over it and so will Intel Mac owners.

Depending on whether they use the date when the Apple Silicon transition kits were made available or the date when the first M1 products were available, or split the difference, I think this would hint that whatever macOS Apple ships in the Fall of 2024 would be a fully defensible target for dropping native Intel support in macOS. Likewise, we should anticipate Rosetta 2 getting the boot from macOS in Fall 2026. 

Finally, it’s important to recognize that the useful service life of your Mac does not end when your Mac no longer supports the latest version of macOS. Sure, you have to pay attention to security related concerns, but the Mac you bought five years ago is still superb at doing everything you bought it to do at the time and for at least a few years beyond that point. I’m still very happy using my Late 2012 iMac. It’s still my primary platform for running VMs for Intel Windows and Linux operating systems. Still performs as well as it ever did, which is good enough for me.

Past is not always prologue but it's a good start. The last G5 Mac, the iMac G5 was launched in October 2005. Steve Jobs then shocked the industry with the beginning of the Intel transition in January 2006, much earlier than predicted and making the iMac G5 an instant lame duck machine after only 90 days.. That iMac ran 10.4 Tiger and ended with 10.5 Leopard. But unlike now where macOS updates are yearly, Tiger began in April 2005 lasting until October 2007 and Leopard went from October 2007 to August 2009.

These days the typical life for a Mac in terms of getting macOS updates is about 5-6 years and the Pro towers lasting 8 years from original GA release. The last Intel Macs were the 2019 Mac Pro, the 2020 Macbook Air (April 2020), the 2020 Macbook Pro (May 2020) and the 2020 iMac (August 2020). So all of these machines began on a version of 10.15 Catalina with Big Sur not launching until November 2020 with the first M1 Macbook Air.

So I could see all of those Intel Macs getting between 1-3 more releases past the most recent Sonoma, which would mean that we'd see a transition away from Intel as early as 2025. I don't think that the current 2019 Mac Pro will get 8 years of updates this time. I also do not think that 2024 is in the cards since I think Apple will tell developers (and customers) a year out when Intel support for new releases will be sunset and despite this note on Vision Pro support, Apple did not indicate a transition schedule during WWDC 2023. I do think Rosetta will stick around longer, perhaps up to 3 additional years to accommodate some older professional apps and plugins.

charlesn said:

saarek said:

It’s such a shame that Apple left Lightning to effectively die (despite the EU being a big reason for the change). There was nothing stopping them from upgrading Lightning to take faster speeds, etc. I’ll never understand why they did not bother investing money into it.

They fought the EU over the directive, but had they worked to keep Lightning up to date, indeed made it better than USB-C they could have pointed to the advantages as an example of why they should be allowed to keep proprietary ports.

Let's assume you're right, that upgrading was possible--what's the benefit to Apple or its customers to have the rest of the tech world on USB-C connectors while Apple stays on Lightning? And let's remember that upgrading Lightning would have required new cables to reap its speed benefits, just like higher speed USC-C protocols require cables capable of delivering those speeds. Case in point: the Apple USB-C cable that ships with the iPhone 15 Pro can't deliver the 10Gbps speed of which the port is capable--you have to buy a "faster" cable for that. (And THAT cable won't be fast enough to handle Thunderbolt speeds, unless you specifically buy a Thunderbolt capable cable.) Meanwhile, all these protocols use the USB-C connector.