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Comment by newsclues | Hacker News Reader

They aren’t forcing you to phase out your machine. They will continue to support it.

At some point macOS will no longer provide an Intel version but that is likely years down the road - perhaps 2026 at the earliest? And likely much later.

And third-parties will supply upgrades as the upgradable parts are roughly standard, so the Mac Pro is likely to be a completely usable machine for nearly a decade to come.

I’m guessing 2030 at the earliest. There are far more Intel macs out there than there were PPC and they have a long useful life span.

After that you’ll still get years on older MacOS, Linux, or Windows. Intel Macs can run both of the latter.

They’re not. The Mac Pro modular design has always been a lie. Yes, it’s modular, but there’s nothing you can put in there because there are no useful drivers.

You can upgrade RAM, storage, GPUs (e.g. 6900 XT), 100G NICs, and even SAS/FC.

Only for ~2 more years. I had a Motorola machine and when they switched to x86, it was useless pretty quickly, far before its time.

The Intel MacBook was introduced in 2006 and SnowLeopard discontinued PowerPC in 2009. So 3 years seems to be about what you can expect before there's no OS, and another 2-3 years after that the patches stop.

I’m still using an iMac from 2007 with a core 2 duo. No software updates but it still hums along and functions as a YouTube machine.

I mean, if you had a Motorola Mac (68XXX) at the time of the x86 transition, you must have gotten a good decade of use out of it...

I kid, obviously. I've never seen anybody refer to the PowerPC as Motorola machines even though Motorola was part of the PowerPC alliance.

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