The Exit Strategy

As you probably know after all this time, Tedium is obsessed with the closing frame, the end of the story. And today, we learned that Apple is finally ending its 20-year run of Intel-based Macs.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that they gave the public one more year of new versions, along with the promise of potential security fixes, avoiding an uncomfortable rug-pull like the one that many PowerPC users experienced with Snow Leopard in 2009. That OS came out a mere three years after the discontinuation of the last PowerPC Mac, and users had to figure out the cutoff was happening by reading Apple rumor sites.

While some Mac models did get short shrift (owners of the 2020 Intel MacBook Air have some angry skeets to write), for the most part, the company did not try to force this transition to happen faster than it needed to.

The commercial for the first Intel Mac, dating to 2006. If you’ve ever seen the video for The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” and think it looks very familiar, there’s a reason for that.

It was as if the company wanted to bury the blow as much as possible, so it didn’t even mention it during the main WWDC keynote, which is the one that the average person cares about. It was instead buried nearly 55 minutes into the 57-minute Platforms State of the Union, where Apple Senior Director of Developer Relations Matthew Firlik dropped the news like this:

Metal 4 is a great example of the tight integration of our software with Apple silicon, creating a whole new class of experiences. In fact, since we began the transition to Apple silicon over five years ago, we’ve been able to add incredible features like Apple Intelligence, Game Mode, Presenter Overlay, and more.

We completed the transition to Apple silicon across our entire product lineup two years ago. So your apps can now depend on and build upon these features too. Apple silicon enables us all to achieve things that were previously unimaginable. And it’s time to put all of our focus and innovation there.

And so, macOS Tahoe will be the final release for Intel Macs. So if you’ve not done so already, now is a great time to help your users migrate to the Apple silicon versions of your apps.

This sort of finality—a one-year pre-announcement from an official Apple source—is useful for any old users who have been holding off for whatever reason. But it’s also great for developers, who now have the OK to transition towards an upgrade if they haven’t already. And certainly, Apple’s ARM-based chips are some of the best processors ever made, based on their balance of speed and energy efficiency, which has made the M1 MacBook Air (nearly a 5-year-old machine!) perhaps the greatest goldilocks machine ever created.

But still, even with all that lead-up, this decision still stings, because it feels unnecessary to put all that good hardware to pasture. As I wrote back in April, a similar decision to put an end of life on Windows 10 is ultimately unnecessary—and it would lead to a lot of good hardware ending up in landfills. That’s the downside, and one we should not ignore.

The upside of the Intel Mac going away is that users aren’t totally screwed. Those 2019 and 2020 models will still likely see security updates for quite a while. And it is possible to install Linux on Intel Macs, though it’s more complicated on the newest Intel Macs because of the existence of the T2 security chip. (There’s actually a project, T2Linux, that has largely solved this issue.) And plus, an old version of MacOS still has a lot of charm to it. With the right security posture it can still remain a very useful machine years down the line.

Finally, the barrier of entry into the Mac market is perhaps at its most cost-effective point in quite some time. Currently, the Mac Mini M4, sporting 16 gigs of RAM and a 256-gigabyte SSD, sells on Apple’s website for $599 and is frequently discounted elsewhere. The original Mac Mini sold for $499 at launch with a mere 256 megabytes of RAM and a 40-gigabyte hard drive. With inflation, that PowerPC Mac Mini would cost the equivalent of $839 today. Put another way, the cheapest way into the Mac ecosystem is 30% cheaper than the cheapest option 20 years ago. Based on a quick analysis of pricing on Low End Mac, this is technically the cheapest that a new Mac Mini (and by extension, entry into the Mac ecosystem) has ever been, accounting for inflation.

Nonetheless, I’m still sad that we have some finality on the fate of the Intel Mac. As someone who spent a long time Hackintoshing back in the days before Apple Silicon reshaped the Mac landscape, I appreciated the freedom the Mac’s Intel compatibility allowed me. For a few great years, you could buy some random piece of junk and turn it into a Mac with a few hours of research and a few hours of work.

No, that was not the way Apple intended you to use it. But like lots of other things Apple didn’t intend you to do, it created a culture of sorts that I and others were happy to oblige in. To me, that culture was immensely valuable, even if it often felt at odds with what this company wanted me to do with its computers and operating systems.

These days, I’m mostly a Linux user. Sure, I still have an M1 MacBook Air, but I use it as a secondary machine on which I run Asahi Linux. But I think what Apple taught me, in my years of working around its limitations as a Hackintosh user, was that I wanted more flexibility in my computing experience, even if it means not having the most power-efficient processors. Over the years, Apple has only given it begrudgingly. The marquee feature of this year’s WWDC was an actual multitasking interface for iPadOS. But it was a decision Apple dragged its feet on for years, first slow-rolling mouse support, then split-screening, then the ability to manage files.

Apple gives flexibility begrudgingly. As its recent App Store saga proved, it is a company that does not like bending. The company’s choice to put MacOS on Intel made its technology surprisingly flexible, whether it liked it or not.

That’s the part about the Intel Macs I’m going to miss.