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macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

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Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#61

Post by kalleboo »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #6
kalleboo wrote: post #4

I hope they keep around the underpinnings for Rosetta 2 (without the macOS parts) just to keep supporting Intel virtualization for things like Docker. Heck then anyone who really needs to run some old Intel app can run a virtualized older version of macOS. But I wonder if they're eager to drop support for the Intel TSO memory model from their CPUs.

Apple will keep Rosetta 2 support for Intel virtualization. See https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...

Oh yeah, I had forgotten about the weird "games" exception. At least that means they'll keep parts of Rosetta 2 around in the code, but they could also end up doing some weird whitelisting for the specific games they want to support and not let anyone else keep using it.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#62

Post by ryukoposting »

troad wrote: post #45
ryukoposting wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on? You don't. You could stay on an old MacOS. Apple would prefer that you tell your customers to stop being poor and buy a new computer. They will make your situation increasingly unbearable until you do. The overwhelming majority of people haven't needed a new computer since 2016. The current economic situation makes a new computer a w…

I think it's a stretch to call Apple's ARM transition "planned obsolescence". The M-series chips are very clear improvements on what came before and there is a clear rationale for that transition. We're talking here about an OS that hasn't even come out yet, that will get years of security support, for computers that Apple hasn't been selling for several years now. Seems pretty reasonable.

I said "manufactured," not "planned." I don't think Apple intended to do this at the outset. Tim Cook wasn't leaned back in an office chair, twirling a moustache saying "yes, let's make every mac made before 2019 SUCK!"

If it was planned, Rosetta 2 would have never existed in the first place. It would have been a qemu fork haphazardly crammed into Xcode.

There was no "planning" here. Here's how I imagine it went: a developer whined about tech debt, management seized an opportunity to generate revenue, neither party considered, yknow, humans, and now we're here.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#63

Post by [deleted] »

ryukoposting wrote: post #54
apetrovic wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's overly dramatic. I don't think a new Macbook Air today is a worse value proposition than some Mac from 35 years ago. I just checked Apple prices from 1991: - Mac Classic II, the slowest of the bunch, $1.900, or about $4.661 today - Quadra 900, the fastest model in 1991, was $7.200 ($17.663 today) - PowerBook 170 was $4600 ($11.285)

"Value" and "price" aren't the same thing. A new computer in 1991 cost more, but it also covered a vastly increased set of use cases versus a machine from 5 years prior (assuming the hypothetical 1991 computer buyer had even owned a computer before). Today, you can buy a used MBP with an M1 and it will do everything a new MBP can do, and the differences compared to a new machine will be imperceptible to most users. P…

[deleted]

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#64

Post by lxgr »

jeroenhd wrote: post #26
lxgr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Would be very sad to lose Wine capabilities as well, and presumably these have minimal macOS dependencies.

Wine can run on aarch64 with FEX reasonably well already, no special instructions or hardware acceleration required. There's a bit of extra overhead, but that shouldn't be a problem for old games on modern hardware, they should run about as well.

Interesting, do you know if performance is roughly comparable with Rosetta 2, i.e., are we talking about a few percent of overhead or something more dramatic? (For CPU-bound code; I understand that the overall effect will be smaller due to GPU code probably being executed host-side in native code etc.)

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#66

Post by microtonal »

icedchai wrote: post #17
skywhopper wrote: post #8

Bad headline. This tweet attempts to explain why Rosetta 2 will no longer work. Which is because the OS no longer supports the Intel platform. That does not explain why the OS does not support the Intel platform.

Because it costs them money to maintain it, and they'll make more money when people upgrade to M series? In all seriousness, it's a little lame. Consider that the Intel Mac Pro (2019 model) was still selling in 2023! That's not that long ago, and those were their highest end machines in terms of memory capacity. The "new" Mac Pro has since been discontinued...

Though buying a Mac Pro in 2023 would be a bit weird. The writing was on the wall. By that point the M1 was almost out for three years and even the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra had been out for a year.

(IMO it stopped making sense buying an Intel Mac after the M1 Air or if your want to be generous the M1 Pro/Max-based MacBook Pros.)

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#67

Post by throwaway27448 »

ryukoposting wrote: post #25
alin23 wrote: post #14

Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on? I get it that macOS has to evolve, but that doesn't mean all apps have to drop Intel support at the same time. On hardware-level apps like my Lunar app I have plenty #if arch(arm64) because some features like reading the brightness nits or reading ambient light is different or completely missing based on the architecture. I need to tes…

> Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on? You don't. You could stay on an old MacOS. Apple would prefer that you tell your customers to stop being poor and buy a new computer. They will make your situation increasingly unbearable until you do. The overwhelming majority of people haven't needed a new computer since 2016. The current economic situation makes a new computer a w…

> Apple would prefer that you tell your customers to stop being poor and buy a new computer.

This is certainly an interesting way to characterize dropping support for old hardware. What is a reasonable way to go about hardware deprecation in your view?

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#68

Post by icedchai »

microtonal wrote: post #66
icedchai wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it costs them money to maintain it, and they'll make more money when people upgrade to M series? In all seriousness, it's a little lame. Consider that the Intel Mac Pro (2019 model) was still selling in 2023! That's not that long ago, and those were their highest end machines in terms of memory capacity. The "new" Mac Pro has since been discontinued...

Though buying a Mac Pro in 2023 would be a bit weird. The writing was on the wall. By that point the M1 was almost out for three years and even the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra had been out for a year. (IMO it stopped making sense buying an Intel Mac after the M1 Air or if your want to be generous the M1 Pro/Max-based MacBook Pros.)

I agree, it is weird, but there were certain workloads (like those needing large memory) that wouldn't run anywhere else. Remember that M1 Ultra, at that time, was limited to 128G of RAM. M2 Ultra brought it to 192G. Intel Mac Pros could take 1.5 TB.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#69

Post by nomel »

tsunamifury wrote: post #49
troad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a stretch to call Apple's ARM transition "planned obsolescence". The M-series chips are very clear improvements on what came before and there is a clear rationale for that transition. We're talking here about an OS that hasn't even come out yet, that will get years of security support, for computers that Apple hasn't been selling for several years now. Seems pretty reasonable.

I have a MacBook from 2017 and and m3 air today. For day to day tasks there is no difference.

Try using it unplugged.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#70

Post by shalmanese »

microtonal wrote: post #66
icedchai wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it costs them money to maintain it, and they'll make more money when people upgrade to M series? In all seriousness, it's a little lame. Consider that the Intel Mac Pro (2019 model) was still selling in 2023! That's not that long ago, and those were their highest end machines in terms of memory capacity. The "new" Mac Pro has since been discontinued...

Though buying a Mac Pro in 2023 would be a bit weird. The writing was on the wall. By that point the M1 was almost out for three years and even the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra had been out for a year. (IMO it stopped making sense buying an Intel Mac after the M1 Air or if your want to be generous the M1 Pro/Max-based MacBook Pros.)

But if you wanted to buy an OSX machine with up to 1.5TB of memory, you only had a brief window between when the new Mac Pro was announced and the old Mac Pro was discontinued to snag one before that option went away forever. The M-series Mac Pro only ever supported 192GB.
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