You got 7 years of macOS updates on your 2012. We’ll be lucky if we get 5 years. Any intel Mac at this point is a poor investment unless you really need to run bootcamp or VM’s
Except it was said that there are new Intel models still in the pipeline and I could still see there being a phased approach with the higher end models being the last to get the new chips. Yes, I'm sure the Mac Pro will be 2 years out, but the 16" is probably somewhere later in the timeline and I'm going to be replacing my Mac later this year.
That’s marketing speak for “please continue to buy our macOS machines while we make this transition.” Those poor saps who bought loaded G5 Mac pros probably didn’t feel so good with their purchases when Intel transition was announced. Buying a new loaded Intel Mac today is a huge waste of money unless you absolutely plan on never upgrading your current macOS apps going forward. (Using boot camp full time is also poor on a MacBook Pro 16 unless someone finds a way to make them run better such as allowing graphics switching while in Windows 10)
I think this scenario is different. So many people have intel CPUs, they also likely develop x86 versions of their apps anyway unless it’s a Mac only app. Even if it is, the universal tool that they showed today means that it’s basically just a tick box to make newly developed apps/updates work on both CPUs.
Have you considered trying the games in Parallels rather than boot camp? It’s a side note because you’d still most likely need an intel Mac to do this in future, but Parallels 15 has made some good developments and on some games (especially non AAA games) the performance loss can be very minimal vs boot camp. It would save you having to restart to play and it would likely save you a chunk of SSD space. This is a comparison with the previous version of parallels:
The mac is dead because the long-term support for intel is gone. There is no future for intel on mac platforms and hence it would be insane to purchase an intel-based mac if you don't really need to. I'm using both mac and windows laptops and the programs I use can be found on both, so I'm switching over to a macbook-like windows laptop. There is no reason to stay.
I think you'd probably need more reason that Apple moving away from Intel to leave the Apple ecosystem. The fact that Apple goes to the length of creating custom SoCs for Mac shows that they are committed to the Mac as a platform and to developers (which they affirmed in 2017), but driving it towards a vision that perhaps not to everyone's liking.
