If they start putting this in every machine going forward I wonder if this will be the end of the hackintosh
How long you think it would take for them to do this depends on whether you really think they'd just decide to cut off a ton of machines at once and reverse course on really long support windows. And long windows really seems to be a roadmap, if you look at how the ipad 2 was supported as well.
I think they care more about "look at how we support our products!" than hackintoshes. What i could easily imagine though is way more features than just imessage and such being gate-kept into "only systems with our secure chip are allowed to run this"
How many iPhones are now in landfills because you couldn't downgrade the OS to an old version that would be usable.
This machine launched with, as i remember, tiger. There's machines barely newer that are literally still supported. How is a 9-10 year support window bad? You can't even do that consistently with windows(look at how many atom machines that were only 2-3 years old were cut off from windows 10, or recent updates therein)
And there's nothing stopping you from turning off the security controller and just installing linux, either. In 9 years almost all of the hardware will be well documented and old hat.
This could have a full 3-4 year or even longer life as a "pro" machine, then a long life as a backup/secondary machine, get donated to a nonprofit, or even as your parents cool looking desktop and be completely obsolete in a lot of senses before it will stop getting updates. This has been a proven track record over the past decade for apple.
And for clarification: i'm not shilling here or anything. I think they're screwing up a lot of stuff, and i refuse to buy one of the current macbook pros and am still riding along on the old style retina pro. But OS support is something they do a great job at. There's original-style silver keyboard macbook pros still supported on high sierra.
Do you have a source for that? It sounds hard to believe
The main document you should read is https://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental... where there are some 100%s, but they don't make this particular promise.
In that report, they list iPhone 6 disassembly recovery by kg/100k phones (search for Tungsten.) Cross-reference with the components by weight for the iPhone 6S (6 is not available; see https://www.apple.com/environment/reports/ for all reports.) Ignoring battery, screen and plastic leaves .063kg/phone, and according to that side bar, Liam recovers .033kg/phone or ~50%. Assuming Apple recycles most of the battery, screen and plastic, they are recovering ~75% of each 6S. That's pretty good, and it's good to know that the unrecoverable portions are staying out of the trash (and hopefully heat/vapor waste is mitigated), but it's years away from being close enough to 100% to round up.
I could not find a reliable source for what portion of each phone is recycled, but Apple is certainly not slacking on the recycling front.
E.g. from the 2017 environmental report
> For example, we’ve melted down iPhone 6 aluminum enclosures recovered from Liam to make Mac mini computers for use in our factories
It's only recovered enough aluminum to build a couple of Mac minis for their own internal use
A hackintosh would mean running macOS on non-Apple hardware, so any security checks could just be patched out. In fact, I'm pretty sure that is how hackintoshes work now.
I've built Hackintoshes so I'm familiar with kext replacing and what not, my idea was more that Apple could do something to limit apps/OS from running on anything that didn't have a t2 chip and it might be difficult to get around, like OSX on exotic or AMD chips can be a bit of a pain. Haven't used one in a few years though. Also the chip stuff is out of my realm of expertise.
Was just a thought I had.
I understand your concern, but consider it this way: The only real mitigation Apple might have is to offload certain critical functionality to the ARM chip, and even then, they would have to drop support for all macOS hardware without T1/T2.
Of course they wont care about $400 hackintoshes but if people are putting together $2K - $3.5 ones it starts to look more in the ballpark of a lost iMac or iMac Pro sale.