It’s the end of an era! Five years after the introduction of Apple Silicon on Macs, and two years after the company fully transitioned its product line to the new architecture, the end of the road is in sight: the company announced on Monday that this year’s release of macOS Tahoe will be the last to support Intel-based Macs.
The field has already been winnowed somewhat: this year’s Mac Tahoe supports only a few Intel Macs, including the 16-inch MacBook Pro from 2019, the 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2020 with four Thunderbolt 3 ports, the 2020 27-inch iMac, and the 2019 Mac Pro.
Intel Macs are not being entirely thrust out into the cold, however; they’ll still get security updates for three years.
Personally, this feels momentous: the first Intel Macs were introduced in 2006, the same year I first started writing about Apple.1 Twenty years later, they’ll be on their way out. But it’s hard to argue with the tremendous success of Apple Silicon in terms of performance and battery life. The Intel Macs have had a good run, but they’re about to relocate to a farm upstate where they can frolic with all those 68k and PowerPC Macs.
- My very first Apple keynote was sitting in the overflow room at Macworld Expo 2006, where Steve Jobs announced the Intel iMac and the new MacBook Pro. ↩
