Mac OS Monterey Features Unavailable on Intel Macs
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
>Live Text for copying and pasting, looking up, or translating text within photos
>An interactive 3D globe of Earth in the Maps app
>More detailed maps in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London in the Maps app
>Text-to-speech in more languages, including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish
>On-device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely offline
>Unlimited keyboard dictation (previously limited to 60 seconds per instance)
Most of them make sense; the M1 has the Neural Engine and ISP, and Intel Macs don't.
Not sure what's stopping them from enabling additional text-to-speech languages or rendering a globe, though.
Text to speech uses Neural Engine as well. Rendering Globe likely uses newer version of Metal only supported on M1.
Apple publishes a full compatibility matrix showing which features are supported on each GPU hardware family: https://developer.apple.com/metal/Metal-Feature-Set-Tables.p...
Not caring to do such thing is, probably, intentional push for customers to update their hardware
Not really. Apple has always had a policy of only supporting features that perform as intended.
Low fidelity “fallback” versions are simply not part of Apple’s approach to design.
Certain features will obviously not work across devices but that is an artifact of the big change in device architecture.
The mentality that you're suggesting is akin to saying (for example) that desktops won't be supported on any display smaller than a given Retina resolution. That would be anti-consumer and totally unacceptable.
Hypothetically, the suggestion from Apple that they would stop supporting features on laptops that are currently for sale because they are "fallback" devices would be the height of arrogance and would piss off a lot of smart people who have each spent thousands and thousands on Apple devices over the past decade.
There is no reason Apple should make things that don’t work as designed.
> saying (for example) that desktops won't be supported on any display smaller than a given Retina resolution.
Yes, this is an absurd exaggeration, because in fact we’re talking about a few new features that are not central to the user experience.
> That would be anti-consumer and totally unacceptable.
It would, which is why they don’t do it, and why it’s not representative of anything.
It’s unclear what point you are trying to make other than that they could make bad design decisions if they wanted to, but in fact don’t.
Isn’t that effectively what they’re doing here? They’re not taking away anything that people are using now - just saying that, for example, you aren’t getting the new ability to copy text out of images which is a cool feature but not a game changer or something anyone has existing habits around.
It seems far less of a gripe than, say, when they required GPUs capable of running a desktop compositor or dropped 32-bit support.
But hey, I’m guessing and you’re Saurik: I have a feeling you know more about this than me and may have considered and dismissed this possibility for a good reason.
As a user it would be vastly preferable for Apple to deploy these features to both cpu architectures, and sure M1 would offer acceleration and better performance.
Considering that Apple hasn't finished fully migrating their hardware lineup to M1 (and are still selling intel macs), this deprecation feels a bit rushed.
It’s a technical requirement if the designers specified a required performance level.
Jailbreakers found a way to enable Siri on it, and it honestly felt exactly the same as the 4S.
> On-device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely offline
> Unlimited keyboard dictation (previously limited to 60 seconds per instance)
>> It’s because Intel Macs don’t have the neural engine these features require.
This is of course utter horseshit. Text-to-speech might be slightly easier with a "neural engine" but the fact that it can be done just fine in other languages without a "neural engine" belies this statement.
Dragon Systems (among others) was doing completely offline speech-to-text dictation on Macs that were 1000x less powerful than today's Macs 20 years ago, and doing it well. If Apple doesn't know how to do it today, that says a lot more about the competence of Apple's programmers than about their hardware.
https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-sp...
Not even close to modern standards.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22523613/macos-monterey-ww...
F*ck me, right? :(
But enough of that, let's look at whether they decided this "for reasons other than technical". A lot of the features (the FaceTime image processing, the dictation and speech stuff, etc.) seem like the kind of thing that was built against their Neural Engine. Intel CPUs don't have custom circuitry for running neural nets, let alone an API that is congruent with Apple's. It makes sense that computers with certain advanced hardware are going to get features that other computers without equivalent hardware can't support.
They're only not supporting new features which have specific requirements of the device — the features it had when you bought it are still supported. The listed hardware support goes back to 2015 and historically they've continued shipping security and stability updates for the previous OS release, so whichever of those old devices are still running won't leave security support until the release of whatever comes _after_ Monterrey (presumably in the fall of 2022) when Big Sur falls out of support.
This is not true. The reasons are technical.