Last Week on My Mac: Forcing decisions

For many, the significance of macOS 16 won’t lie in its additions, but in its potential removals: will it support any Intel Macs, and if so, which? For such a contentious issue, speculation has been disappointingly limited in the run-up to the anticipated announcement at the start of WWDC next month.

I have seen popular but unfounded assertions that Apple supports Macs with its current version of Mac OS for a period of five years. There are different interpretations as to whether that time should run from a model’s date of first release, or when it was discontinued. As many Macs have been offered for sale for over a year, that can make a big difference. As I demonstrated yesterday in my latest brief history, previous transitions haven’t followed any consistent rules.

History

The last 68K Mac was available up to October 1996, but with the transition to PowerPC Macs, Classic Mac OS dropped support for 68K models in October 1998, after only 2 years support.

The last PowerPC Mac was offered by Apple over a brief period between October 2005 and August 2006, but support for it was dropped from Mac OS X after exactly 3 years in August 2009. Even if you start the clock when that G5 model was first released, any five-year rule would have required it to be supported by current Mac OS X for at least another year.

Late Intel Mac models are more complicated, as the last volume sales of Intel iMacs ceased in March 2022, but Apple continued to offer the Intel Mac Pro until June 2023. If Apple did have a five-year rule it would now be committed to maintaining full macOS support for some Intel Macs until the autumn/fall of either 2027 or 2028, even if by then most of them had been replaced by Apple silicon models.

Savings

Other opinions claim that Apple will continue to support just some remaining Intel Macs beyond macOS 16, but others currently running Sequoia will be dropped. The flaw in that is cost, as significant reductions in cost would only be achieved by eliminating all Intel support.

If macOS 16 were to support a single Intel Mac, then there would be little change in its cost. It would still need to consist largely of Universal binaries, there would still need to be kernel extensions to support Intel chipsets and old graphics cards, and most of all those would need to be included in every update to macOS 16 until it ceases security updates in the summer of 2028.

There’s also the question of continuing support for Rosetta 2, together with all its supporting Intel dyld caches; they alone account for around 1 GB of every downloaded update for Apple silicon Macs. Apple has ensured that, unlike Rosetta in transitional versions of Mac OS X, Rosetta 2 can be dropped with Intel support in macOS, as it will remain available in lightweight virtual machines running previous versions of macOS, for the rare cases it’s still needed.

Demand

Like many other business decisions, termination of support is largely driven by marketing and cost. Apple appears to have continued supporting 2019 iMacs as the last Intel models without T2 chips largely because of Enterprise customers who have continued using them in their large fleets. On the other hand, it dropped support for the 2013 Mac Pro, sold for six years up to December 2019, after macOS 12 Monterey was replaced by Ventura in 2022, less than three years after the last of that model was sold.

Decision time

Without knowing the demand from Enterprise users for continuing support of Intel Macs in the next major version of macOS, and the number of Intel Macs that have been upgraded to run Sequoia, it’s anyone’s guess as to what Apple has decided. We won’t know that for a couple of weeks yet, but I’ll guarantee that either way there’ll be disappointment. If macOS 16 doesn’t support any Intel Macs, there’ll be those who are upset because they won’t be able to upgrade, and if it does there’ll be those who are upset at its features that are only available on Apple silicon Macs.

But if it does turn out to be Arm-only, perhaps the biggest losers will be those who hope for OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) support to enable their cherished Mac to continue running the current macOS. If macOS 16 is no longer Universal, then it will simply never run on any Intel Mac. Apple could see that as a good way to convince those who have been sitting on the fence that it’s time for a new Mac.