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New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

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Apple still sells Intel 13" MacBook Pros on their website. Support for Intel is far from over.
There may still be a 16" Intel MBP refresh this year. Hackintoshing is by no means over either.

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Grampa is rambling, be quiet!

The transition from 68K to PPC saw older software supported in one form or another for about 5 years. The transition from RISC to x86 worked in about the same way. I expect x86 to be unsupported by Apple from 2025, though the big factor in that will be how fast M1 is adopted. This matters in more ways that one -- devs will not be planning any new releases on x86, beginning now. Updates will slowly vanish as well for established titles. Many of your favorites applications will never transition to M1 at all as devs have long moved on. We've seen all this before.

Of course the presentation numbers were inflated, as all tech companies do that. It remains that, from a processor architecture point of view, components-on-a-chip has some serious efficiency gain potential, so I can buy that battery life extension.

As well, Intel never maent integrated GPUs to be full gaming or design platform. They were a very nice convenience, that's it. Makes no difference on the PC side as anyone serious has dedicated GPUs, but for Apple products where thermals are such a major issue, it was a big problem. Taking ownership of the GPU and putting it in the core resolves many issues and ensures at least decent performance, probably more.

I can see the idea behind ram on the core for added performance as well, but when Apple sells a monopolized 8gb increase for $200USD, that feels like major sucks to me for the future. The new Apple M1 models are entirely disposable, almost consumables, exactly like the iPhones have become, and that's probably part of the plan.

As attractive as they may be, the M1 Macs are not designed for me at all. I like to tinker and upgrade and increase capabilities over time, not buy, use and thow to the recycling two years later. I like to buy Gen -1 or Gen -2 and tweak them up to current standards. You can no longer do that with M1. So Hackingtosh forever - though the OS will need a LOT more tweaking than porting between x86 code.

Finally, it is only a matter of a few years, since these are so un-upgradable, for a whole lot of M1 cores to be available on the second hand market, even if Apple chokes other source of supply. That opens the gate to some great possibilities, knowing how incredibly creative folks here and elsewhere can be when driven!

- Pat, currently working on a Z420 gamebox.
 
Apple still sells Intel 13" MacBook Pros on their website. Support for Intel is far from over.
There may still be a 16" Intel MBP refresh this year. Hackintoshing is by no means over either.

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It’s not over for us yet, but assuming Apple continues its pace of yearly IPC performance increases, we know 3nm is coming, probably in 2022. At that point in time, even if Apple still supports macOS on intel x86, the performance delta between a DIY intel build vs the latest m-series chip might be massive. (Don’t know this for sure yet as alder lake and lunar lake might be good.)

yes, hackintosh will still be alive for a few years, but it seems that Apple is incentivizing some of us to move on. Building and supporting a hackintosh comes with a host of challenges, Opencore and clover quirks, etc.

So what is the point of spending a given amount of money on an intel hackintosh build, dealing with all the quirks that doing so brings, when you could spend the same money (or even less) and get faster performance, and ease of use (on say a Mac mini or even a MacBook), and get work done in less time??

Intel needs to innovate and pull a rabbit out of a hat.
 
Wow! Now they're selling "Apple Pi" - ARM based macs without pro-apps but with some ugly BigSur system that looks like deepin linux. I do NOT see any reason to use MacOS any more...
 
Wow! Now they're selling "Apple Pi" - ARM based macs without pro-apps but with some ugly BigSur system that looks like deepin linux. I do NOT see any reason to use MacOS any more...

You obviously don't know much about Arm processors.
 
I find all this Hackintosh doom-and-gloom proclamations to be pretty silly. With a transition to ARM timeline of about 2 years, Apple will continue to sell Intel computers well into 2021 and possibly longer. Let's assume a (short) OS transition of only 4 years -- that means that OSX 11.3 (Seal Beach...you heard it here first!) will still support Intel CPU's. So that brings us to 2024-2025 at least, and that also gives an additional few years beyond that for Hackintosh users who stay on that very functional OS. Considering that there are still so many people running High Sierra today, using an older OS isn't unusual.

Basically I can see Inter and AMD Hackintosh to continue to be a feasible solution for many until 2028 at least.

7-8 years is an eternity for computer technology. Who the hell knows what we will all be using by that time, or what type of CPU's will exist? I predict that slowly-but-surely we'll be moving into total cloud computing, making all of this CPU/GPU talk kinda moot. Who cares how many cores or RAM your computer has when all the processing is happening on some massive server somewhere?
 
I find all this Hackintosh doom-and-gloom proclamations to be pretty silly. With a transition to ARM timeline of about 2 years, Apple will continue to sell Intel computers well into 2021 and possibly longer. Let's assume a (short) OS transition of only 4 years -- that means that OSX 11.3 (Seal Beach...you heard it here first!) will still support Intel CPU's. So that brings us to 2024-2025 at least, and that also gives an additional few years beyond that for Hackintosh users who stay on that very functional OS. Considering that there are still so many people running High Sierra today, using an older OS isn't unusual.

Basically I can see Inter and AMD Hackintosh to continue to be a feasible solution for many until 2028 at least.

7-8 years is an eternity for computer technology. Who the hell knows what we will all be using by that time, or what type of CPU's will exist? I predict that slowly-but-surely we'll be moving into total cloud computing, making all of this CPU/GPU talk kinda moot. Who cares how many cores or RAM your computer has when all the processing is happening on some massive server somewhere?

When Apple transitioned from PowerPC to Intel, the last Power Mac G5 only got two additional versions of Mac OS X, Tiger and Leopard.
 
I find all this Hackintosh doom-and-gloom proclamations to be pretty silly. With a transition to ARM timeline of about 2 years, Apple will continue to sell Intel computers well into 2021 and possibly longer. Let's assume a (short) OS transition of only 4 years -- that means that OSX 11.3 (Seal Beach...you heard it here first!) will still support Intel CPU's. So that brings us to 2024-2025 at least, and that also gives an additional few years beyond that for Hackintosh users who stay on that very functional OS. Considering that there are still so many people running High Sierra today, using an older OS isn't unusual.

Basically I can see Inter and AMD Hackintosh to continue to be a feasible solution for many until 2028 at least.

7-8 years is an eternity for computer technology. Who the hell knows what we will all be using by that time, or what type of CPU's will exist? I predict that slowly-but-surely we'll be moving into total cloud computing, making all of this CPU/GPU talk kinda moot. Who cares how many cores or RAM your computer has when all the processing is happening on some massive server somewhere?

Yes macOS on IA will be supported for a few more years.

The problem is that macOS on IA will not be keeping up with the latest technology from Intel (cough) and AMD over those years.
E.g. AMD 68000 GPU's and beyond will not see official drivers. We will not see official 11, 12, 13, 14th Gen CPU/Chipset support nor future AMD CPU's in the 7-8 years timeframe you are hoping.

What we will see is that existing (recent) Chipsets, CPU's and GPU's that are currently supported, likely to continue to be supported but even then there's no guarantee. E.g. iMac14,2's are already unsupported on Big Sur. So even those real mac's will be officially stuck on Catalina with the hope that Apple continue to provide Security fixes. Remember Apple is a business and it's in their interest to "encourage" users to BUY new h/w by quickly obsoleting IA based stock they currently have.
 
I find all this Hackintosh doom-and-gloom proclamations to be pretty silly. With a transition to ARM timeline of about 2 years, Apple will continue to sell Intel computers well into 2021 and possibly longer. Let's assume a (short) OS transition of only 4 years -- that means that OSX 11.3 (Seal Beach...you heard it here first!) will still support Intel CPU's. So that brings us to 2024-2025 at least, and that also gives an additional few years beyond that for Hackintosh users who stay on that very functional OS. Considering that there are still so many people running High Sierra today, using an older OS isn't unusual.

Basically I can see Inter and AMD Hackintosh to continue to be a feasible solution for many until 2028 at least.

7-8 years is an eternity for computer technology. Who the hell knows what we will all be using by that time, or what type of CPU's will exist? I predict that slowly-but-surely we'll be moving into total cloud computing, making all of this CPU/GPU talk kinda moot. Who cares how many cores or RAM your computer has when all the processing is happening on some massive server somewhere?
To me, the question isn’t when will Apple stop supporting intel, but more so: will Apple’s future m-series chips be more or less superior in performance? That’s a big big unknown right now (intel needs to innovate).

What will be the point of owning a slower hackintosh, that won’t run iOS and iPadOS apps?

Unless intel catches up in performance, and I really hope it does, then this is the future I foresee for me. A Ryzen-based box to game. And an Apple m-series box for everything else. I already have a thunderbolt 3 dock hooked up to two monitors... so all I have to do is plug one TB cable into a TB/USB4 port of the machine in question for my peripherals...

Z490 might just be the last intel-based system that I ever build. I hope it ain’t so. But only time will tell.
 
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