Next macOS Minimum System Requirements Change (After macOS Golden Gate)

[Yebubbleman]

As was foretold a year ago, macOS 27 Golden Gate has dropped the last four supported Intel Macs, and as was heavily rumored, every Apple Silicon Mac is supported. While even the base M1 is still a technological marvel, it is inevitable that every Apple Silicon Mac currently in existence today will reach a point where Apple no longer supports it for the next major version of macOS.

So, for a fun game of pure speculation, whether it come in macOS 28, 29, or 30, what do you think the next change in minimum system requirements will be? What do you think the technological reason (if there even is one) would be for said change?

I could see the base M1 Macs being the only ones dropped (as there were significant changes that every other SoC thereafter had that it did not). I could also see the entire M1 family being dropped. I could also see Apple wanting to drop support for the Touch Bar sooner than their other base M2 Macs. I can see the dividing line between the M2 family and M3 family one day being a dividing line (just maybe not the very next one).

 

[Yebubbleman]

While I could see many of these happening, my gut is telling me that Apple will only drop the base M1 Macs and that M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, and all other newer M series family Macs will remain supported.

I think Apple could cut support for the M2 13-inch MacBook Pro early so as to discontinue Touch Bar support in the operating system. But I'm thinking they won't be that aggressive, considering that the successor to the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro really didn't NEED to continue that design and Apple could've done any number of things to that model (such as position the 15-inch MacBook Air as its successor) instead.

 

[JPack]

M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra are all part of the same architectural generation, so it’s unlikely they’ll get selectively dropped from support.

Did A9X get dropped after A9 or 10X after A10? Apple doesn’t do that because most core components of macOS or iPadOS doesn’t rely heavily on parallelism. So the extra CPU or GPU cores don’t matter for macOS updates.

What’s more likely to happen is Apple will start gating 8GB machines from AI features, which are integrated into the OS.

 

[Yebubbleman]

A12 remained supported on iPads a good year after it was dropped from iPhones. And technically, it's still supported on the 2nd Generation 4K Apple TV model. Incidentally, the base M1 uses DDR4 RAM and lacks some video encode/decode engines that are present on M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, as well as all M2 family and newer Macs (all of which have DDR5 RAM). I'm not saying that Apple will definitely make those an OS-level requirement, but they totally could.