End Of MacOS on Intel?

[flmmkr]

I understand the gaming aspect for those that have a Hackintosh. That does make sense. But Apple doesn't care about the Hackintosh community, and probably sees it as an opportunity to quash it entirely.

I suspect the last version of MacOS that will run on Intel to be 10.17.0 which in 2021, if Apple begins the transition in 2020 with the first ARM Macs announced at WWDC 2020 and shipped later in 2020 with 10.16.0. The first MacOS to not support Intel would be 10.18.0. That follows the transition model from PowerPC to Intel. It took 14 months for that transition. Existing Macs with Intel processors will still work and will still be supported, but will be limited to 10.17.0.

I guarantee Apple has been working on this for at least a few years already, and probably even as early as they began designing their own SOC for the iPhone and iPad. If the new Mac Pro isn't being released until 2019, and they're supposed to begin this transition in 2020, they likely already have a working Mac Pro with ARM processing and are designing the new Mac Pro around that, and just making it work with Intel now, knowing the focus needs to be ARM since that is their future. Apple does not want to design an Intel Mac Pro, just to throw it away a year or two later to design an new Mac Pro for ARM.

 

[Korreckj328]

I understand the gaming aspect for those that have a Hackintosh. That does make sense. But Apple doesn't care about the Hackintosh community, and probably sees it as an opportunity to quash it entirely.

I suspect the last version of MacOS that will run on Intel to be 10.17.0 which in 2021, if Apple begins the transition in 2020 with the first ARM Macs announced at WWDC 2020 and shipped later in 2020 with 10.16.0. The first MacOS to not support Intel would be 10.18.0. That follows the transition model from PowerPC to Intel. It took 14 months for that transition. Existing Macs with Intel processors will still work and will still be supported, but will be limited to 10.17.0.

I guarantee Apple has been working on this for at least a few years already, and probably even as early as they began designing their own SOC for the iPhone and iPad. If the new Mac Pro isn't being released until 2019, and they're supposed to begin this transition in 2020, they likely already have a working Mac Pro with ARM processing and are designing the new Mac Pro around that, and just making it work with Intel now, knowing the focus needs to be ARM since that is their future. Apple does not want to design an Intel Mac Pro, just to throw it away a year or two later to design an new Mac Pro for ARM.

Likely correct if they follow through on this. Though I still have a hard time imagining any arm chip performing well enough for a pro. MacBook Pro, sure, those aren't that powerful. I could see that happening. iMac Pro or Mac Pro? Those are a different league and I'll have to see it to believe it.

 

[Midphase]

I suspect the last version of MacOS that will run on Intel to be 10.17.0 which in 2021, if Apple begins the transition in 2020 with the first ARM Macs announced at WWDC 2020 and shipped later in 2020 with 10.16.0. The first MacOS to not support Intel would be 10.18.0.

I think it will be slower than that. For one, they won't update all their machines simultaneously. I think portables will be first, maybe just the Mac Book and Mac Book Air line. Probably followed by Mac Book Pro's and eventually iMacs. I think if they unveil the new Mac Pro in 2019 (knowing Apple it will be December 2019), I doubt they're going to want to redesign its architecture so soon.

I think an educated guess is mid-to-late 2020 for some portables, late 2021 for all portables and maybe Mac Mini (if it even still exists), mid-2022 for iMac and even later (if ever) for the Mac Pro.

Once the entire line has been replaced (I am not 100% sure that the Mac Pro will follow that path anyway), it will be another couple of years until they release a version of the OS that doesn't support Intel CPU's at all (so that's probably 2024-ish or beyond).

I think there is a solid reason to believe that by then we won't be using actual processing in our system but will be mostly using terminals. The main bottleneck at the moment is the internet speed, but even that is changing far more rapidly with Spectrum nagging me every other month that they just bumped up their speed again.

So yeah, Hackintosh, Mac Pro, Windows computers as we know them at the moment will eventually disappear anyway. But all of this doom-and-gloom that I'm reading implying that Hackintosh and TonyMac is finished in a couple of years is utter nonsense.

 

[flmmkr]

Apple would have to be okay with supporting concurrent development of two different OS's at the same time for several years in that case. Knowing Apple, they won't do that. Apple has always been quick to let old technologies go, hardware and software. I don't see them changing their ideals regarding that. We are also only assuming they're going to be ARM-based. Apple could be doing something else entirely. Maybe AMD is going to make the CPU for them, non-ARM-based, closer to x86, or some kind of hybrid, or something completely new.

 

[niteFlight]

I think there is a solid reason to believe that by then we won't be using actual processing in our system but will be mostly using terminals. The main bottleneck at the moment is the internet speed, but even that is changing far more rapidly with Spectrum nagging me every other month that they just bumped up their speed again.

So yeah, Hackintosh, Mac Pro, Windows computers as we know them at the moment will eventually disappear anyway. But all of this doom-and-gloom that I'm reading implying that Hackintosh and TonyMac is finished in a couple of years is utter nonsense.

This is a positively terrifying prospect to me, for a number of reasons.

 

[guslima]

There's too much to consider when discussing about changing an entire line of well established computers on the market (and considering development community too) to a new architecture just because "why not?".

Hypothetically considering that Apple has been developing a grounding breaking architecture that can compete directly with the X86_64 we've been using for years, with all the optimizations through CPU generations, it still a huge step to make within few years, considering also the new computers they've been selling. Support is a important factor when it comes to the company side of the story. Apple is famous for their well built long running machines too, like computers from 2011 working perfectly well nowadays without any major problems, so certainly abruptly shifting this paradigm would be a huge mistake.

We have to count with the possibility to build hackintoshes with those new ARM laptops coming out on the market, as it's possible to do similarly what the community has been doing for the compatibility of AMD processors on the macOS kernel.

Anyway, I think would still possible to keep the community alive.

 

[Korreckj328]

I think there is a solid reason to believe that by then we won't be using actual processing in our system but will be mostly using terminals. The main bottleneck at the moment is the internet speed, but even that is changing far more rapidly with Spectrum nagging me every other month that they just bumped up their speed again.

I really hope you're wrong and that isn't the future. Too often lately I have to take my laptop with me to get some work done while I'm waiting in a hospital, nursing home, or doctor's waiting room. Assuming there is even a wifi signal there, I usually have to use a VPN to get around their proxies so that I have full access to the internet. Going to where my computer is just a terminal and the main code execution was in the cloud would go very poorly for me in those use cases.

 

[johnnybravo19]

This might seem outlandish to some, but what if Apple acquires AMD, and makes its own custom CPU?

 

[Korreckj328]

This might seem outlandish to some, but what if Apple acquires AMD, and makes its own custom CPU?

If Bloomberg is right, they would have already had to acquire AMD for this to be feasible for a 2020 release of the first product. They wouldn't be able to just do that sort of thing instantly. If the 2020 date and all the rest of it is true they have some prototypes at Cupertino.

 

[Gen_]

Honestly I don't get what everyone is so worried about. This is HACKintosh after all. Look, there will be a 2019 MBP because they are on yearly cycle. That MBP will have to sport an Intel processor, and that processor will have to support at least the next 3 versions of macOS. Simple. That gives us 5 years, and at a time where we are already starting to lose support across the board in low end GPUs.

We should be much more worried that the ARM co-processor is intended to replace the SMC.

When the ARM OS comes out, much like the PPC versions of Tiger etc there will be fat binaries for 3 years to maintain backward compatibility. We won't have CPU support in-kernel for the ARM side but we have 3 full cycles of open-source OS (with source-code).