Apple has announced its final version of macOS for Intel

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...

This is is great to hear, but even 3 years are probably not enough. 2020-made computers should be used 5+ years more.

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.

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.

But the 2015 keyboards are still superior.

If I remember correctly the current Thinkpad should have the same key travel distance as my MBP / old scissors.

But new scissors definitely have better key stability, something carried forward from butterfly ( although not as good as butterfly ). And for people who have preference with key stability it is a better choice.

How do you get pass [Verify you are human by completing the action below] on site like https://www.phoronix.com. ?

An i9/32GB RAM MBP now costs under $350 used. It will only get better.

More things can be done through the web interface than before, but it's still not web first, and not being able to push a button because your OS is 6 years old is pretty frustrating.

I found Apple's aggressive change as a user also frustrating. I don't WANT to constantly be rebuying apps and hunting down alternatives to abandoned programs to keep doing what I was doing yesterday.

*Yes, I know why. I don't care.

I went to the Apple.com "find your mac" tool and even knowing what I wanted to get back, I couldn't even convince it to recommend a Mac Pro. https://www.apple.com/mac/best-mac/

That said, cheap Macs never really grabbed my attention and more than a cheap ChromeOS box does. I want to pay for more features, not less. I already have a media transcode server, there's really nothing I could use a Mac mini for besides maybe the world's most lame set-top box.

So less than 5 years of OS updates.

They haven't released a new Intel-based product / product-line since August 2020, and haven't shipped any new units of the same criteria since June 2023.

While new versions of macOS will not be available to them, macOS Tahoe will almost certainly EOL in Fall 2028. That means their Intel-based devices will have a lifetime anywhere from 5 to 8 years at worst, depending on your time of purchase.

Maybe I'm just used to this at this point, but I think this is pretty reasonable.

The most painful parts are (1) it's a bit hot and loud under load; (2) you need to patch modern software like git, likely with little hope to upstream; (3) waiting hours for those "simple" things to compile - which, in the end, tells us something important about what we'd consider "simple" nowadays.

For both retro and previous-generation hardware, security is the most important concern. Patches for PowerPC kept coming until 2011 or so (that's almost 10 years after that particular machine was released). I'd expect the Intel Macs to keep getting official patches until 2030, and in the meantime I wouldn't be surprised to find community efforts to extend that. "Sorbet Leopard" was a thing for PPC Macs, the Hackintosh community is much stronger than back then.

Netbsd manages to support PowerPC somehow... So yeah maybe they still should. They certainly have the money to do so.

For example, I have a 3rd gen Intel Xeon that runs circles around regular newish processors in brute processing force (think compiling and such). Yet, MS doesn't officially support it anymore with win11. I know you can circumvent the TPM requirement, which I do, so I'm still using it, but this just shows how arbitrary this limit is.

In Apple's case, at least they can say it's a different architecture and whatnot.

Some resellers still have them in inventory, at least I came upon one a few weeks ago.

That makes it a 3 yrs EOL situation. Pretty terrible considering the prices of these devices.

At least the notorious Chromebooks were sold super cheaply (notorious for their non-existent update policies) - not the case here

They were also still being sold by Apple the last time I bought a MacBook pro, which was around 2022 iirc

As long as we can install linux on it, they can drop support. I don't care a single bit

- Not being able to install debian on M3/M4 has been the only thing that keeps me from retiring that machine, I'd rather keep changing broken components and batteries, because even though moving away from x86 is the right thing to do from an efficiency point of view, we don't have an open standard between manufacturers so their ARM chip, and every other ARM chip, are effectively a proprietary architecture in which the customer ultimately lose because he has no control on its own hardware

There's also enough community interest to maintain Win10 support for more legitimate projects: <https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat>.

I'd also like EU to step in and mandate a continued patching period proportional to the number of deployed devices. After all, it's in their own interest: many devices used in day-to-day administration/operations likely do not need an upgrade; landfill is costly; etc.

Like billions of other people, her phone is her computer. But she occasionally runs into a web site for work, or from a government agency, that requires a real computer.