Comment by cywick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cywick | Hacker News Reader

It's really disappointing how aggressively they have started to drop macOS support for slightly older Macs.

Big Sur, which was released in Nov 2020, still supported the MacBook Air (2013) and the MacBook Pro (Late 2013). When Ventura is released only two years later, not even the MacBook Pro (2016) is supported, which was sold until Jun 2017. The fact that Ventura even drops support for a Mac that they sold until Dec 2019 (i.e., the "trash can" Mac Pro), is just mind-boggling.

I understand that they want to transition away from Intel Macs as fast as possible, but deprecating these Macs so aggressively is really terrible, both from a sustainability perspective and a consumer perspective.

I still keep a Mac mini (2011) around for guests to use for things that are not particularly sensitive (since it stopped receiving security updates a few years ago). It's not the fasted machine by any stretch, but it is still perfectly fine for watching movies, browsing the web, and anything else that does not heavily tax the CPU.

I agree this is completely unjustifiable, especially with regards to the Mac Pro.

Can these machines even run Linux without losing hardware features (like T2 acceleration?)

The above said, I can see why they want to do it. It makes sense to want to stop supporting Intel macs as early as they can, and that means bringing down expectations of support life every year so it’s not a sudden cutoff that would cause an uproar.

It’s still B/S however you look at it though, and I feel really bad for anyone stuck on these platforms that feel like the rug has been pulled.

And yet it should cause the uproar anyway…

I own a Mac mini (late 2014) and it still run perfectly fine especially when I upgraded its HDD disk to an SSD, it upgraded automatically to macOS 12 Monterey and was hoping it will be able to upgrade to macOS 13 but unfortunately, it seems to be the end..

It’s interesting that this seems like it may happen faster than the PowerPC -> Intel transition, where it took three years after the last PowerPC model was replaced and Snow Leopard stopped supporting PowerPC.

Did OS X have security updates then?

This transition is way slower than PPC to Intel. They had the entire lineup changed by the end of 2006 starting the same year. By 2009 PPC models seemed particularly ancient.

Meanwhile with the current transition Apple has yet to introduce a Mac Pro replacement over a year and a half in.

Isn’t the Studio pretty much a Pro?

If you don't need PCI-E slots and only need 128GB RAM maybe it is. But remember the Mac Pro has a memory ceiling of 1.5TB.

I haven't checked because I don't have a mac but it really depends if they have decided to increase support life and security updates of the previous macos release.

You don't really need Ventura if your current release is supported a long time.

They don't specify any support life or security lifetimes in advance. Typically what they do lately is update the previous two versions with security updates so you get a couple extra years lagging behind. But unlike MS or a lot of Linux distros there is no support promise and no EOL date.

I've got an upgraded 2007 mac mini (core 2 duo or something?) running as a time machine server with uptime of like 5 months. By far the most stable thing we've got at home.

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