After two decades, Apple has announced its final version of MacOS for Intel. Guess that means Hackintoshing is done, too.
As you probably know after all this time, Tedium is obsessed with the closing frame, the end of the story. And today, we learned that Apple is finally ending its 20-year run of Intel-based Macs.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that they gave the public one more year of new versions, along with the promise of potential security fixes, avoiding an uncomfortable rug-pull like the one that many PowerPC users experienced with Snow Leopard in 2009. That OS came out a mere three years after the discontinuation of the last PowerPC Mac, and users had to figure out the cutoff was happening by reading Apple rumor sites.
While some Mac models did get short shrift (owners of the 2020 Intel MacBook Air have some angry skeets to write), for the most part, the company did not try to force this transition to happen faster than it needed to.
The commercial for the first Intel Mac, dating to 2006. If you’ve ever seen the video for The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” and think it looks very familiar, there’s a reason for that.
It was as if the company wanted to bury the blow as much as possible, so it didn’t even mention it during the main WWDC keynote, which is the one that the average person cares about. It was instead buried nearly 55 minutes into the 57-minute Platforms State of the Union, where Apple Senior Director of Developer Relations Matthew Firlik dropped the news like this:
Metal 4 is a great example of the tight integration of our software with Apple silicon, creating a whole new class of experiences. In fact, since we began the transition to Apple silicon over five years ago, we’ve been able to add incredible features like Apple Intelligence, Game Mode, Presenter Overlay, and more.
We completed the transition to Apple silicon across our entire product lineup two years ago. So your apps can now depend on and build upon these features too. Apple silicon enables us all to achieve things that were previously unimaginable. And it’s time to put all of our focus and innovation there.
And so, macOS Tahoe will be the final release for Intel Macs. So if you’ve not done so already, now is a great time to help your users migrate to the Apple silicon versions of your apps.
This sort of finality—a one-year pre-announcement from an official Apple source—is useful for any old users who have been holding off for whatever reason. But it’s also great for developers, who now have the OK to transition towards an upgrade if they haven’t already. And certainly, Apple’s ARM-based chips are some of the best processors ever made, based on their balance of speed and energy efficiency, which has made the M1 MacBook Air (nearly a 5-year-old machine!) perhaps the greatest goldilocks machine ever created.
But still, even with all that lead-up, this decision still stings, because it feels unnecessary to put all that good hardware to pasture. As I wrote back in April, a similar decision to put an end of life on Windows 10 is ultimately unnecessary—and it would lead to a lot of good hardware ending up in landfills. That’s the downside, and one we should not ignore.
The upside of the Intel Mac going away is that users aren’t totally screwed. They still will likely see security updates for quite a while. And it is possible to install Linux on Intel Macs, though it’s more complicated on the newest Intel Macs because of the existence of the T2 security chip. (There’s actually a project, T2Linux, that has largely solved this issue.) And plus, an old version of MacOS still has a lot of charm to it. With the right security posture it can still remain a very useful machine years down the line.
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Finally, the barrier of entry into the Mac market is perhaps at its most cost-effective point in quite some time. Currently, the Mac Mini M4, sporting 16 gigs of RAM and a 256-gigabyte SSD, sells on Apple’s website for $599 and is frequently discounted elsewhere. The original Mac Mini sold for $499 at launch with a mere 256 megabytes of RAM and a 40-gigabyte hard drive. With inflation, that PowerPC Mac Mini would cost the equivalent of $839 today. Put another way, the cheapest way into the Mac ecosystem is 30% cheaper than the cheapest option 20 years ago. Based on a quick analysis of pricing on Low End Mac, this is technically the cheapest that a new Mac Mini (and by extension, entry into the Mac ecosystem) has ever been, accounting for inflation.
Nonetheless, I’m still sad that we have some finality on the fate of the Intel Mac. As someone who spent a long time Hackintoshing back in the days before Apple Silicon reshaped the Mac landscape, I appreciated the freedom the Mac’s Intel compatibility allowed me. For a few great years, you could buy some random piece of junk and turn it into a Mac with a few hours of research and a few hours of work.
No, that was not the way Apple intended you to use it. But like lots of other things Apple didn’t intend you to do, it created a culture of sorts that I and others were happy to oblige in. To me, that culture was immensely valuable, even if it often felt at odds with what this company wanted me to do with their computers and operating systems.
These days, I’m mostly a Linux user. Sure, I still have an M1 MacBook Air, but I use it as a secondary machine on which I run Asahi Linux. But I think what Apple taught me, in my years of working around their limitations as a Hackintosh user, was that I wanted more flexibility in my computing experience, even if it means not having the most power-efficient processors. Over the years, Apple has only given it begrudgingly. The marquee feature of this year’s WWDC as an actual multitasking interface for iPadOS. But it was a decision Apple dragged its feet on for years, first slow-rolling mouse support, then split-screening, then the ability to manage files.
Apple gives flexibility begrudgingly. As its recent App Store saga proved, it is a company that does not like bending. The company’s choice to put MacOS on Intel made its technology surprisingly flexible, whether they liked it or not.
That’s the part about the Intel Macs I’m going to miss.
The fact that Warner Bros. Discovery is breaking up again, already, spinning off its cable assets, just makes me want to say one thing: I want to not care about the business decisions of David Zaslav, but he makes it so hard.
I clearly need to pay more attention to The Family Circus. Don McHoull has apparently discovered that the strip has been recycling and updating frames, replacing old TVs and old haircuts, for nearly a decade, with things picking up after the pandemic.
Sufjan Stevens’ landmark Carrie & Lowell, which just got a reissue, earns the rare 10 rating on Pitchfork. Well-deserved. In Apple WWDC parlance, it’s a 6 out of 5. It is Sufjan’s best album, even if he understandably has tough feelings about it these days.
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Comments
Maybe with this there's finally no need any longer to have those mile-wide 256 byte gaps between items in Metal uniform buffers :) (on iOS the alignment is just 16 bytes)
Also hopefully all the special-case handling for 'managed resources' can be dropped (but I guess that would also imply no longer supporting any external non-Apple GPUs).
I'm actually looking forward to a 3D-API that can fully focus on a single GPU architecture that's developed side-by-side with its 3D API - it will be a nice testing ground of what the future of 3D APIs could look like.
> I'm actually looking forward to a 3D-API that can fully focus on a single GPU architecture that's developed side-by-side with its 3D API - it will be a nice testing ground of what the future of 3D APIs could look like.
Aren't the graphics APIs on consoles that, more or less?
By flohofwoe 2025-06-1013:15 I haven't done console development for a long time, but while the console vendors use their own graphics APIs, the GPUs are (more of less) off-the-shelf parts from AMD or NVIDIA, while Apple completely controls both software and hardware side, so at least theoretically they have more flexibility to harmonize hardware and software.
By henrebotha 2025-06-106:491 reply The article claims T2Linux has "largely solved" the problem of Linux on T2 Macs. Is that true? I have a 2020 MBP with touch bar & 2 Thunderbolt ports. My reading of the T2Linux project sounded a lot more negative than that, but I'd love to be shown I'm wrong.
By WhyNotHugo 2025-06-1015:08 There's a dedicated page listing the status of different hardware: https://wiki.t2linux.org/state/
Looks like keyboard, touchpad and webcam are not upstream. It's not clear to me if you need a custom kernel, or just out-of-tree drivers.
Suspend, audio and graphics are "partially working".
By rock_artist 2025-06-106:054 reply The interesting questions are:
- When will their toolset drop support for compiling for Intel / x86_64?
- When will they drop Rosetta2?
Compiling/delivering universal binaries is something that as a developer, especially for some markets, you’d like to keep. meaning we try to support older Macs as possible.
For Rosetta2, it might be less needed with all apps transitioned, but for developers using containers, it might be more important to have Intel based containers for a longer period.
By camillomiller 2025-06-106:186 reply I have answers ;)
• Rosetta will remain available as a general-purpose tool through macOS 27 to help developers migrate their Intel apps, with limited gaming-focused functionality continuing beyond that timeframe
• Intel-based Macs will continue receiving security updates for 3 years following macOS Tahoe
• After the general Rosetta support ends, Apple will maintain a subset of Rosetta functionality specifically for older unmaintained gaming titles that depend on Intel-based frameworks
Rosetta is also very useful for running x86 Linux containers for dev workflows. Hopefully that will continue to be supported.
By matthewmacleod 2025-06-107:171 reply Who literally yesterday launched a container framework and tool.
By msephton 2025-06-110:56 ...that calls out its own compatibility with Rosetta 2.
Hmm sounds to me like Wine will die then, since it's an x86 application relying on Rosetta to run?
Apple killing gaming on their platform again, like they did with the 32->64 bit transition...
No, "new" ports to arm of 5 year old games sold at full price as app store exclusives don't count...
By steelbrain 2025-06-107:001 reply The “gaming focused functionality” mentioned in the parent post is probably referring to Game Porting Toolkit, which builds on top of wine. So no, It doesnt seen like Wine will die just yet
By nottorp 2025-06-107:29 "Rosetta will be pared back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps—specifically, older games that rely on Intel-specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers. "
Says the Ars Technica article about this topic.
Doesn't sound like Wine at all to me...
> Intel-based Macs will continue receiving security updates for 3 years following macOS Tahoe
This is is great to hear, but even 3 years are probably not enough. 2020-made computers should be used 5+ years more.
By dwaite 2025-06-1022:24 Three years after Tahoe would be Sept 2029, thats two years past their hardware support (which goes to limited support at 5 and ends at 7)
By conradev 2025-06-106:47 Which version of Xcode drops the last Intel SDK as a deployment target?
if i have a 2019 imac (coffee lake) for ios mobile development, how long will i be able to use it for that purpose? i am going to face xcode limitations? will i be able to still push to the app store in the years to come?
By rock_artist 2025-06-109:37 > if i have a 2019 imac (coffee lake) for ios mobile development, how long will i be able to use it for that purpose? i am going to face xcode limitations? will i be able to still push to the app store in the years to come?
Based on appstore accepting only last {#}os SDK (not deployment target). Usually Xcode (and Safari) gets support for the previous OS. meaning,
Xcode 26 min macOS is Sequoia 15.x.
So, Xcode 27 min macOS will be macOS 26.
That gives about 2.5 years for Intel Macs to allow complete AppStore integration.
I guess https://github.com/xtool-org/xtool might become more dominant. iiuc, it also valid to use it on "a Mac" even if it was phased out :)
By rock_artist 2025-06-109:31 > After the general Rosetta support ends, Apple will maintain a subset of Rosetta functionality specifically for older unmaintained gaming titles that depend on Intel-based frameworks
I guess Apple Rosetta support will be a mix of interests.
1. Apple currently has interest in getting games on their platform. They even made a debugger tool running on Windows so a game dev could profile/debug from his Windows machine :)
2. Unless Apple will have enough power (meaning they will have leverage over games devs), they won't be able to decide when they completely drop Rosetta2.
3. Most likely that companies with personal connections with key people at Apple would take part in when/if the pull the plug on Rosetta2. I guess big software companies might be able to convince Apple is they'll decide to remove it prematurely.
> For Rosetta2, it might be less needed with all apps transitioned, but for developers using containers, it might be more important to have Intel based containers for a longer period.
Most of the games I have from Steam/GoG on my M1 Mac are running through Rosetta2 ... and that probably won't change in the future.
It seems like dropping Rosetta2 is yet another way for Apple to murder their own relevancy for any kind of gaming... despite ok hardware.
By rollcat 2025-06-1010:50 This.
Apple in the past couple of years was all like, "oh look, gaming on macOS is good now".
I can run a 1995 game OOB on my Windows laptop in 2025.
My question is: on macOS, what's the actual market for casual games, like most of what's on Apple Arcade - especially against iOS? What's the market for the few AAA titles they promote - vs Windows?
People want their existing libraries. With Arm64 in the way, developers who up until now only had to target x86, will care even less. Factorio only cared because they already had a Switch port underway: <https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-371>
Dropping Rosetta2 will be the final nail in the coffin. If Apple did actually care about games, they would strike a deal with Codeweavers to integrate Crossover directly with the system.
Maybe I'll finally get a proper Windows gaming machine.
By risho 2025-06-106:11 seems like rosetta 2 will be around for a long time, especially considering they are still putting dev effort into game porting toolkit which is heavily dependent on rosetta 2.
By fsflover 2025-06-1016:15 > When will they drop Rosetta2?
