When will Intel support end?
Last year, we laid out three possible scenarios for the end of Intel Mac support. One of those scenarios—that macOS 14 Sonoma would be the final Intel-compatible release—didn’t come to pass. The reality was somewhere between the most optimistic scenario we outlined (that macOS 15 would run on all the same hardware as macOS 14) and the in-between scenario (the last wave of Intel Macs from 2019 and 2020 would be supported, but older ones would not, which ended up being true for the MacBook Air but not the other models).
Apple still won't say how or when it plans to wind down Intel Mac support. Looking at our data, I think it's quite likely that Sequoia will be the last Intel-compatible version of macOS. But that's not a foregone conclusion, and any one of these three scenarios could fit with all the data we've gathered.
Scenario 1: Sequoia is the last version of macOS to run on Intel Macs.
Why it could happen: The future is Apple Silicon. While there have been individual features in the last few releases that have only worked on Apple Silicon Macs, Sequoia is the first where the operating system's headlining features—all of the AI stuff, basically—won't work on Intel at all.
Statistically, Apple has provided a minimum of five or six years' worth of macOS updates and another two years' worth of security updates to the last few generations of Intel Macs. With Sequoia, Apple will just barely hit those numbers for the very last batch of 2020-era Intel Macs. This is less support than most Intel Macs have gotten, but it would be more or less in line with the amount of support the company has provided for the 2018/2019 MacBook Airs, the 2016 MacBook Pros, and the first couple waves of Intel Macs in the mid-'00s.
Why it might not happen: Apple was selling some Intel Macs as late as 2023. Apple usually bases macOS support dates on hardware release dates and not continuation dates, but this would lead to a situation where Apple was supporting hardware repairs for some models for years after software and security updates had dried up.
And while support for 2020's class of Macs would match the bare minimum of software support that Apple has provided latter-day Intel Macs in this scenario, it would still be lower than the average, which you can see in our speculative charts.
Scenario 2: Apple supports a few of the final Intel Macs in macOS 16 and drops everything else.
Why it could happen: Late 2019 and early 2020 Mac releases like the Mac Pro, MacBook Air, and iMac would all be getting less than Apple's average number of updates if macOS 15 were the end of the line. One final update would bring these releases more in line with Apple's recent and historical average.
Here's another factor: Apple rarely talks about its future plans, but when it plans to make big changes that would disproportionately affect developers, it has occasionally given them a year or so of advance warning. To pick a couple of recent examples, this happened with the end of support for 32-bit Intel apps in macOS 10.15 Catalina and the deprecation of legacy kernel extensions that began in macOS 11 Big Sur.
In other words, if Apple intended to drop Intel support next year, there's a chance it might have said so this year. This isn't determinative, but it's a small piece of evidence to consider.
Why it might not happen: Dropping support for 2019 and 2020 Macs in 2025 would not be totally unprecedented. Compared to the end of the PowerPC era, five years' worth of macOS updates and seven years' worth of security updates seem relatively generous.
Keeping all of the code needed to support Intel chips in macOS for the sake of a bare handful of models also seems like a lot of work for not much benefit.
Scenario 3: Apple keeps the support list mostly the same in macOS 16 and ends Intel support in macOS 17.
Why it could happen: The last few generations of Mac hardware are pretty homogenous, and they all share similar CPUs and GPUs. If Apple were already supporting late 2019/2020 Macs, supporting 2018 and early 2019 Macs wouldn't be a ton of extra work.
If this did happen, it would also make the end of the Intel Mac era look pretty normal, software support-wise—lower than the peak of the Intel era but pretty close to the historical average for Intel Macs.
Why it might not happen: Even assuming Apple doesn't end Intel support entirely next year, the company hasn't let extremely similar hardware stop it from arbitrarily dropping Macs from the support list before. The 2018/2019 Airs that Sequoia is dropping have a ton in common with officially supported 2018 Mac minis and MacBook Pros, up to and including the presence of an Apple T2 chip.
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