Mac App Store Apps Can Now Drop Support for Intel Macs

[maxoakland]

Apple was selling Intel Macs as new only 3 years ago. That’s not long enough. It’s disrespectful to the buyers and bad for the environment

 

[maxoakland]

PPC got one Major OS release, 10.5 Leopard, and then it was gone. There were PowerPC Macs that were still shipping and came with Leopard in the box and never got a major update. This was back when there were 18 to 24 months between Mac OS X releases though, so it worked out to over three years from announcement I think. But once the MacOS App Store landed in 10.6.8, PowerPC support from developers basically evaporated.

See above. The earliest Intel Macs didn’t have it much better either. The Core Duo and Core Solo based Macs only got Leopard and Snow Leapard because those processors were only 32bit. So only about 3 years for them also. This era of long lived macOS support is very new.

So because Apple did something bad in the past we have to accept them doing something bad now?

I could see giving Apple the benefit of the doubt back then because they were a much smaller company and there were always concerns they’d go out of business

At this point, there’s no excuse

 

[JPack]

Apple was selling Intel Macs as new only 3 years ago. That’s not long enough. It’s disrespectful to the buyers and bad for the environment

It was back in March 2020 when Apple launched the last Intel MacBook Air. That's six years ago.

Just because Apple keeps Intel models on the shelf doesn't mean support gets extended. The support date is always based on launch date. Some people ignore this, but that's a fact demonstrated by Apple for years.

If someone buys an iPhone 16 today from the Apple Store, how can it possibly still receive 6-7 years of major iOS updates? The buyer paid less than the launch price. That means it will receive less support.

 

[turbineseaplane]

It was back in March 2020 when Apple launched the last Intel MacBook Air. That's six years ago.

Just because Apple keeps Intel models on the shelf doesn't mean support gets extended. The support date is always based on launch date. Some people ignore this, but that's a fact demonstrated by Apple for years.

If someone buys an iPhone 16 today from the Apple Store, how can it possibly still receive 6-7 years of major iOS updates? The buyer paid less than the launch price. That means it will receive less support.

Does this not strike you as a little bit crummy?

I mean, if this is really the case, the older products they sell as new should be a lot less expensive and they should be a lot more upfront about how much less support they are going to get.

 

[JPack]

Does this not strike you as a little bit crummy?

I mean, if this is really the case, the older products they sell as new should be a lot less expensive and they should be a lot more upfront about how much less support they are going to get.

It does suck a bit, but in most cases, Apple products are refreshed frequently enough that this isn't a big problem.

Ideally, Apple would knock $100 off the product price for every year it's not refreshed. But since it's Apple, they do it discreetly through resellers who discount the product instead.

With the Intel Macs, they made it clear enough that Apple Silicon was the path forward. Old models were still available for legacy users and developers. Although Apple was still selling Intel Macs in 2023, who was actually buying them and expecting long support?

 

[turbineseaplane]

Although Apple was still selling Intel Macs in 2023, who was actually buying them and expecting long support?

I just think that is letting Apple off the hook here.
I think it’s wrong for them to be selling anything new that they are going to knowingly not support as long.

Customers shouldn’t have to worry about that, and color me skeptical, but I’m pretty sure an Apple Store employee wouldn’t have candidly told them…

“Yeah, you could buy the Intel one, but we are going to rug pull support on that sooner”

I mean, if that’s the plan… Stop selling them!

 

[Makosuke]

Alas, it's a darn shame that the our old 5K iMacs can't be paired with a new Mini and used in target display mode. If it were, I'd have already laid out money for that new Mini.

I have wished that myself, although in practice Target Display Mode was never a "set it and forget it" thing, so it never seemed practical to use an iMac as a display for more than occasional use, certainly not as a daily driver.

There were also some definite technical limitations; unless I'm mistaken, the first two generations of 5K iMac had Thunderbolt 2, which did not support enough bandwidth for a 5K display, so it was technically impossible to hook them up (if memory serves, back in that era even if you did buy a standalone 5K display there was shenanigans like dual video connections required to get a signal to it).

One might assume that by the time Thunderbolt 3 rolled around, even if it would have been theoretically possible to bring back TDM, so few people missed it that nobody wanted to bother with the required engineering.