As Tim Cook prepares to open the Worldwide Developer Conference next week, countless Apple fans are getting ready for new life to be breathed into their hardware. There will be something for everybody, from iPhones and iPads to Apple Watches and MacBook Pro laptops. Yet there will be some let down as Apple prepares to drop support for their laptop from the next version of macOS.
The MacBook Pro Meets macOS Tahoe
It’s worth noting that Apple is refreshing the numbering system across all of its operating systems, so the next version of macOS will be macOS 26, and the moniker naming looks set to continue with macOS Tahoe.
Apple continues to offer multi-year support across its hardware, including the Mac platform in general and the MacBook laptops in particular. And this is where things get awkward for the laptop owners.
The MacBook Pro Support Window
The support window for the MacBook Pro is expected to reach back as far as the 2019 MacBook Pro. That passes an important rubicon. At that point, the Mac family was still running on x86-based Intel hardware. The ARM-based Apple Silicon arrived at the end of 2020, with the M1 MacBook Pro, M1 MacBook Air, and M1 Mac Mini. Apple Silicon offered a significant leap in performance, power and efficiency.
That Apple can support the M1 chipset some five years down the line and bring the full range of new tools, including the latest generative AI suite, should not come as a surprise. Yet Apple still plans to support the older, slower and inefficient Intel MacBook Pro models.
How much can Apple offer the older laptops? It’s clear for MacBook Air owners still running Intel-powered Airs. The MacBook Air from 2020, the last with the Intel Core chipset, will be dropped, leaving only Apple Silicon powered MacBook Air models supported by macOS Tahoe and the versions that follow.
It’s less clear for the MacBook Pro. At the very least, Apple should offer security updates to the laptops, but whether the latest apps and utilities are offered remains to be seen. Given the demands placed on the hardware, it’s likely to be a limited subset of those available to Apple Silicon Macs.
The MacBook Pro Is Already Losing Support
Consumers using third-party apps will already be familiar with the “unsupported” error messages on apps that are exclusively for Apple Silicon Macs) a list that is growing longer by the day), and more demanding apps such as Photoshop are asking for so much that the Intel Mac are being left behind, no matter what Cupertino is offering.
It’s unfortunate that no laptop can last forever. While Apple’s support window is rarely specified for Macs, six years of updates is welcome, yet feels short for an Apple product. This is the downside of the 2020 move from Intel to ARM; Apple gained a much more powerful platform, but was left having to support the older platform for a polite number of years.
That support is coming to an end. The consumer-focused MacBook Air has a hard stop coming up. At the same time, the professionally focused MacBook Pro will squeeze out another year or two, which will be welcomed by those using the laptop in a production environment, but Tim Cook has put the platform on notice of cancellation.
The MacBook Pro that many knew and loved is coming to the end of its story.
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