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How long will 2013 macs be supported for?
- Thread starter maclunian
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That was because of the switch from PPC to Intel.
When you look back at the reasons why the older models were dropped it is mostly because:-
a) 10.6 Snow Leopard dropped support for PPC based Macs.
b) 10.7 Lion dropped support for 32-bit Processors.
c) 10.8 Mountain Lion dropped support for 32-bit EFI.
The life cycle of PC's (including Macs) has gradually been getting longer over the years as normal tasks which people perform (Internet, email, word processing, storing files e.g. pictures, watching videos) hasn't really needed much of an increase in computer performance. So in recent years OS compatibility hasn't really been cut off for older machines due to processor speed, memory or storage, instead its mainly been architectural changes.
So barring any major architectural changes in the coming years I would expect a machine bought now would be supported for running the latest OS for quite a long time.
Still going strong on my 2007 Mini with Snow Leopard. If the whole industry starts to move away from desktop or even laptop computers, then I'd bet they'd become frozen in time, with no upgrades to the OS that would not run on the hardware of today.
I have a 2007 iMac 20" and it runs Mavericks (10.9.2 installed) just fine, actually great.
I do a bit of woodworking and other hobbies so I have this in my garage/man cave
for doing sketch ups, youtube, streaming music, etc so nothing that requires a lot of processing/graphics processing. This replaced my 2001 iMac, anything other than basic web surfing would drag it to it's knees, and even some surfing would.. it still gets the job done as long as you're a very patient person.
I do a bit of woodworking and other hobbies so I have this in my garage/man cave
for doing sketch ups, youtube, streaming music, etc so nothing that requires a lot of processing/graphics processing. This replaced my 2001 iMac, anything other than basic web surfing would drag it to it's knees, and even some surfing would.. it still gets the job done as long as you're a very patient person.
It isn't out yet. It's still only available to developers for testing, and not the general public.
Do you think apple will be cutting off all core 2 duo processors and only supporting devices with a Nehalem Micro-architecture in the next OS X (i.e. 10.10?) upgrade?
If so, the following models would be supported:
Mac Pro (Early 2009 and newer)
iMac (Late 2009 (iMac11,1 only), Mid 2010 and newer)
MacBook Pro (Mid 2010 (15" and 17" only), Early 2011 and newer)
MacBook Air (Mid 2011 and newer)
Mac Mini (Mid 2011 and newer)
What are your thoughts?
If so, the following models would be supported:
Mac Pro (Early 2009 and newer)
iMac (Late 2009 (iMac11,1 only), Mid 2010 and newer)
MacBook Pro (Mid 2010 (15" and 17" only), Early 2011 and newer)
MacBook Air (Mid 2011 and newer)
Mac Mini (Mid 2011 and newer)
What are your thoughts?
Question:
How long will 2013 macs be supported for?
My guess:
Short end -- 3 years
Long end -- 5 years
The "answer" will probably be "somewhere in between".
BUT...
Just because a Mac is no longer "officially supported" by Apple DOES NOT mean it becomes "unusable".
I have a 2007 white Intel iMac that won't run Mountain Lion or Mavericks, and I use it all the time. It still runs just fine...
How long will 2013 macs be supported for?
My guess:
Short end -- 3 years
Long end -- 5 years
The "answer" will probably be "somewhere in between".
BUT...
Just because a Mac is no longer "officially supported" by Apple DOES NOT mean it becomes "unusable".
I have a 2007 white Intel iMac that won't run Mountain Lion or Mavericks, and I use it all the time. It still runs just fine...
You will make it to 2018-2019 (and maybe 2020) when 8Gb will be the minimum amount of RAM required to run the latest version of OSX. This is only an estimate, but would be about that time that your iMac would then be unsupported.
Just a little thing to note (and is what I'm doing with my 2013 iMac), don't upgrade the OS all the way to the point that it is no longer supported. By this time, OSX will most likely bog down you Mac. I would recommend upgrading 2 or 3 OS versions then leave it (i.e if your happy with the performance of OSX 10.12, just leave it there). This way, you will then get a further 8-10 years out of it until file formats and other things start to unsupported the OS. This way, you could squeeze out 10+ years, and it still won't be running slow.
or example: if you had a 2007 iMac, you could have kept upgrading unto Mavericks (10.9), but if you stayed at 10.6 (Snow Leopard), you would have better performance. This is only sort of true as Mavericks is actually quite a good upgrade when it comes to optimisation, but you don't know if and when an update like it would ever come again. So you would have been best to have kept it on Snow Leopard and never bothered to upgrade to Lion or Mountain Lion, then realising that OSX 10.9 Mavericks would run pretty well on you machine.
I hope this game plan helped you out.
I've noticed that the only Macs with an Intel Haswell micro architecture are the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and iMac.
The new Mac Pro (December 2013) has an Ivy Bridge XEON processor. Same goes for Mac Mini.
Do you think that Mac devices with a Haswell CPU will be supported with OS X updates for longer than those with an Ivy Bridge CPU?
The reason I ask is because Haswell is a "Tock" and thus a new microarchitecture.
It is possible, but I'd say that would only be an extra year or two at most. The small increase in power means they may both be discontinued at the same time.
The 2013 iMacs Support AVX2 / FMA3 instructions with their Haswell processors. Perhaps that would differentiate the two significantly enough. What are your thoughts?
I doubt that that would really make much difference. I don't see that as being a reason for cutting off support for older processors.
There is really very little to differentiate recent Macs with regards to their specs, only slight speed increases. The exception being the transition from the old Mac Pro to the new Mac Pro design.
At some point 8GB of RAM may be required but that should be quite a way off as Apple is still selling machines with 4GB which cannot be upgraded.
Possible. I don't see instruction set's like that making much of a difference. I'd say that the 2012 and 2013 are going to go out together, maybe a difference of a year between them. Look for more major differences though, this is why Apple usually discontinue Mac products.