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macOS Ventura Drops Support for Older Macs, Works With 2017 and Later Machines
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It's not as simple as it looks. Unfortunately the devs have and do come across issues. Skylake being removed has meant that any libraries, kexts or apps that depended on that to run before can no longer do so. As such there already issues that have popped up such as non-working Hackintools and older apps. Even the supposed 'Coffee Lake' support with Ventura has come with issues as Z370 based hackintosh users couldn't boot because they had to turn off an important feature in the kernel for Big Sur/Monterey which was required for successful Ventura booting.
You've been reading my mail. I too have a '16 MBP. Out of the SEVEN Apple devices that my wife and I have, (MBP, two iMacs, two iPads, two iPhones) the only ones that will not be obsolete are the two iPhone 13 Pros. At the rate that Apple is outdating their devices I may as well go back to Windows. At least with Windows it's a known variable.
Nope if you need to use Xcode as it has always required the latest (or, in cases, the second latest and the latest) MacOS version. You can't run it on an "old" desktop.
I got the 2017 MBA (to replace my mid-2011 version) in 2019. Even with this news I'm still grateful they did, if only because it let me avoid the butterfly keyboard.
Counting the days till the M2 Air is released though. This one I do hope to keep at least 5 years!
You are right, 7 years is a lot. But that still doesn’t mean that devices can’t continue to do their job for as long or longer.
We still use a 35 year old vacuum cleaner in my workshop and it works fine. My last car lasted 16 years and had a fuel consumption not much worse than newer models and was more practical. We just bought a 192 year old farm and after a bit of renovation it will serve well for a long time to come.
Yes, for cutting edge stuff the latest is indeed the greatest, but most ditched machines would perfectly well play YouTube, handle mail and documents, other web stuff and even do 3D visualizations. But once you stop OS support, you block web browser and security updates.
This was the only reason to finally ditch our 12 year old iMac. It could no longer handle YouTube and other websites because it did not get browser updates so that JavaScript and CSS would fail. And mail apps were blocked due to missing security features.
The new M1 Mac is super snappy, 12 years is a long time and we won’t regret the change, but it feels wrong to ditch stuff that still does the job properly. Especially in our times. The iMac will live on as a music machine but you can only repurpose a certain number of devices.
And that I now have to consider my 4 year old (bought in 2018) MacBook Air 2017 model outdated is just ridiculous.
We pay a premium to Apple. In the past one of the strongest arguments was lasting value, but that is no longer the case, because I could not hand it over to someone else, because neither they can upgrade the installed software to the latest web browser. Digital security is key.
Remember Apple is an environmental conscious company.
That is why Microsoft offers OS updates on the Apple hardware until 2025.
With Windows, it was a known variable until Windows 11. I have a lovely i7-7700 I built in early 2017 here, and it's officially unsupported in Windows 11 and will stop getting all security updates in 2025. So that's zero major OS upgrades and 8 years of minor/security updates. (Although, I suppose some people would count the feature updates for Windows 10 as a bit more than 'minor' updates, but I don't think they're as major as Apple's annual updates) Oh, and just to make the insult worse, a stupidly-low-end one-year-newer laptop is supported. And if I go and replace it tomorrow, who knows whether what I buy tomorrow will be supported in Windows 12 or it will be again, one year too old. It's important to remember that now that they stopped charging for OS upgrades, Microsoft only makes money when they sell HP/Dell/Lenovo/etc a shiny new OEM licence. (And yes, the irony is that with a few rather-well-documented tweaks, current versions of Windows 11 run just fine on every 64-bit machine that runs Vista/7/8/8.1/10, i.e. the NT 6.x family, regardless of CPU/TPM/etc. But Microsoft reserves the right to break such unsupported systems or not give you any security updates at any time...)
When you compare how Apple treated my now-traded-in mid-2014 MBP with how Microsoft treated my i7 7700, if anything, it makes me want to buy more Macs. I'll take a predictable 4-6 years of major OS upgrades followed by 1-2 years of security updates over being told my 4 year old high-end Windows desktop "doesn't meet the performance and reliability expectations" for Windows 11. That being said, I have a lovely 2-month-old refurbished mid-2020 Intel iMac whose life expectancy I am starting to get a little anxious about...
Except that MS also just made a major move with Win11 removing support for lots of older machines.
I don’t need h.265 to run MacOS that’s absurd
At least with Windows, you can hack the system much more easily to allow for unsupported hardware.
And on top of that, there's still Linux + Wine.
Right now, they're not actually requiring any of Windows 11's requirements. You can use the documented registry tricks to turn off the hardware checks and it works fine on older x64 hardware, even BIOS-booting, Secure Boot-less, TPM-less, etc machines. I got a brand new laptop from Lenovo with 11 preloaded that had Secure Boot off. Really shows how arbitrary the hardware requirements are - my sense is that the engineering team assumed their product should run on everything that runs 64-bit NT 6.x, then the bean counters told them to add some checks for various hardware features very late in the development process (and then they added easy ways to defeat those checks).
But... they could add code that actually requires a TPM or instructions only present in 8th-gen Intel Core CPUs in any random updates and you are basically out of luck. Or they could just increase the hardware checks for any updates, so... no more security updates for you on your unsupported hardware. And sure, maybe that will be hacked a few weeks/months later, or maybe not...
Not that different than the various hacks to get newer versions of macOS on unsupported hardware. I traded in my aging mid-2014 MBP on an M1 Max MBP rather than attempt to run Monterey on it, but my guess is that trying to run Monterey on it would be a similar experience to getting Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.
Depends on the hardware, of course.
Very, very old hardware might struggle with Windows 11, but most everything from 4-5 years ago should run fine.
In Windowsland, I would draw a distinction between "decent" hardware vs junk rather than old vs new. (Apple has never sold a product that I would consider worthy of the junk category so the distinction doesn't apply in Macland)
Decent hardware from 10-12 years runs Windows 11 just fine - I have a nice 11 year old quad-core Sandy Bridge laptop with 16 gigs of RAM and a SSD (both installed later - 16 gigs of RAM/SSD would have been mighty high end in 2011) on which Windows 11 does just as well as 10 which does just as well as 7. But Microsoft now says no, no, your 5 year old high end desktop doesn't meet their "performance and reliability expectations" for Windows 11, which is complete BS.
Meanwhile, junk from 4 years ago, while officially supported for Windows 11, will be a complete disaster. Even junk sold today will be a complete disaster. The junk computer is fundamentally near-useless with the operating system it came with and newer operating systems won't revive it. Yet Worst Buy seems to move millions of these things...
Honestly, I think the main purpose of these junk Windows machines is to eventually get people into Macs. After owning one or two of those, people just conclude that if they want a decent computer, they need to open their wallets and get a Mac. And then, if they encounter a decent business-grade Windows laptop at work, they are shocked that i) Windows doesn't necessarily always have to suck, and ii) their work Windows laptop cost as much as a comparable Mac, if not more.
I have an ancient ThinkPad (2009) running Windows 10 and it flies with 8GB of dual channel RAM and an internal SSD. Windows 11 is nothing more than a dressed up Windows 10 trying to look like macOS. I have installed Windows 11 on the same laptop via a workaround and it runs the same as Windows 10. No issues
Okay, it does not render your Mac unusable, but there is no way of knowing how long Apple will continue to provide security updates (likely for 2 more years), or how long 3d-party app support will continue (usually for much longer).
But this is nothing to be proud of. You can still run Windows 10 and Office 2021 on the original Intel-Mac mini (2006). The last Apple OS which supported that Mac was released in 2009. That makes no sense...
I do not buy Apple's virtue signaling of being very environmental conscious. In the end, they are a company with the primary intention of making money and having us to buy their new shiny stuff so they keep making more money. All this environmental bs they market is just there to make us feel good for buying Apple products.
You can, but do you want to?
2GB, Intel display-out, 1 or 2 ancient cores running at sub 2GHz and spinning rust.....
Yes, but that's in part because Windows has stagnated since the Vista debacle. You get Vista that introduces much higher hardware requirements, new driver models, new bugs, etc. The ecosystem isn't ready for it, so Vista gets a bad rep. Then they fix some of the bugs, tweak the interface, by then Moore's law means the hardware is cheaper and the hardware vendors have written updated drivers, and that becomes 7. Then 8/8.1 are largely about trying to turn Windows into a tablet platform. Then 10 is about trying to undo the worst excesses of 8/8.1. Instead of actually adding useful features or updating the internals for modern hardware, Microsoft has spent the past 10+ years introducing confusing interface changes on top of the same fundamental OS core.
I used to have a Windows box with a C2D E6600 I ordered right when it launched in summer 2006. Probably the most consequential Intel chip in the past 25 years. I am pretty sure that if I still had that machine, I could turn off Win11's UEFI/TPM/Secure Boot checks and it would run Windows 11 nicely until the end of support for Windows 11, whenever that turns out to be. So that's a 20+ year life cycle. Your first-gen Mac Mini is limited in Windows by the fact that the Core Solo/Duo are 32-bit-only and 11 drops 32-bit, but an x64-capable machine from six months later could keep going and going if it wasn't for Microsoft's artificial restrictions.
I might add, too, that none of the hardware other than RAM has really changed since 2006. Video card breaks? PCI-E video cards are still around. Hard drive breaks? Those things run SATA and you can get plenty of SATA HDDs or SSDs today. Power supply breaks? I'm pretty sure today's ATX power supplies can power a 2006-era C2D just fine. And even RAM - the local computer store still seems to have plenty of DDR2. Unlike PATA/AGP/etc systems (whether Power Macs or Windows) of a few years earlier, these things are not really vintagey. So, absent catastrophic motherboard/cap failure (which requires more skill to fix) that machine can keep going and going pretty much forever... which is undoubtedly part of the reason that Microsoft, which no longer makes money from selling upgrades, is saying "hold on a second. you're not going to be allowed to keep running our current software on a machine that you last paid us for in 2009"
Apple, for better or worse, is moving fast and breaking things. Yet, if my two Macs (compared to zero pre-2015) are any indication, that seems to be working for them...
Glad to see someone else who gets it
Apple has done a masterful job of convincing folks that they "care about the environment"
Maybe "a little more than some other companies", but in no way are they doing even remotely close to all they could be doing to really up their eco-cred
Call me when they use their design chops to make amazing machines with clever ways to keep using them for years and years (upgrades, easy fixes and repairs, all built into the design ethos).
They mostly make very expensive appliances, with needlessly shortened lifespans...lets just be honest
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Right? I'd been hoping to upgrade my 2012 rMBP to a mid-15 but now I'm not sure if it's worth it... I was going to based on Monterey support, and now they're so cheap, a mid-15 with 16/512 is 380 or a '14 with 1tb of storage is 410.
More like Apple wants more money fast. Zero reason to take the 16' out but hey, now you will need to buy a new product.
Cook has done one thing since taking over. Maximizing profits while providing the absolute least. First thing he did want cut customer service payroll and Genius Bar appointment staffing.
"Unlike in the Windows world (at least, up until Windows 11) and the Linux/BSD world, Macs are more like smartphones or tablets in that support for them is regularly cut off well before the point they could no longer run the latest version of macOS. This has both advantages and disadvantages we don’t need to regurgitate here, but it’ll be interesting to see if the Apple Silicon era will accelerate the culling of older Macs."
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arstechnica.com
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Some Macs are getting fewer updates than they used to. Here’s why it’s a problem
Dropping old Macs can be justified, but some are dying before they should be.
arstechnica.com
Sad but true. I expected my 2016 MBP to last longer so I’m buying used until Apple stops treating us like we don’t matter