Apple is whittling down support for Intel Macs

It is the end of an era.

We all saw this coming, but it seems as though Apple is ending support for Intel Macs once and for all. The last Intel Mac was released in 2020, and it was the Intel iMac. Oddly enough, it was announced after the transition to Apple silicon was announced.

With the announce of macOS Tahoe 26, there are only a handful of Intel Macs that are supported. The last supported Intel Macs are the MacBook Pro 2020 (Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports), MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019, iMac 27-inch 2020, and the 2019 Mac Pro. These Macs were the fastest and best ever of their category announced before the switch to Apple silicon.

This means that either next year or the year after will most likely be the end of Intel Mac support.

This raises a lot of questions and concerns from me. I use an M1 MacBook Air with only 8GB of RAM. Will my MacBook suddenly lose support because it is the next oldest machine from the MacBook Air line? It is significantly faster than the MacBook Airs that came before it, and is even on par with the 2019 MacBook Pro 16-inch, so it should be able to keep going for a few more years, right? Will the optimization that Apple can develop over Apple silicon allow for an even longer lifespan for Macs – instead of 6-7 years, maybe even 9-10?

This is something that no one can truly predict, but my gut feeling is that the M1 Air might get a year or two, at most, longer support than the 16-inch 2019 MacBook Pro. This is purely because of the optimization layers that are simply not present on the Intel Macs.

This is all speculation, and we will have to wait and see what Apple does in the next few years.