The End of Intel macOS

I don’t watch Apple keynotes or news that often anymore; the company hasn’t done anything worth paying attention to for years. But Ernie Smith caught this nugget at the end of the Platforms State of the Union talk:

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.

I still bristle a bit when I hear desktop software referred to as “apps”. It reads as though they’re trivialising their complexity and importance; though maybe I’m just old fashioned.

But back to this announcement! We knew it was coming—we’ve known for many years at this point—it was just a question of when. Those of us who lived through past transitions knew that our older hardware was living on borrowed time from the moment the new architecture was announced. It’s not all bad though; replacing Mac OS X on my iBook G3 was my gateway into NetBSD! But I digress.

Still though, it’s interesting to look back at Apple’s foray into Intel Macs: what a curiosity they were. It was weird to me at the time that they they leaned so heavily on Intel’s name recognition, rather than saying they were moving to x86. It limited their potential collaboration with AMD for example, though I suppose they were still in the proverbial silicon woods at the time.

I had the first Intel MacBook Pro, as I mentioned in passing in a blog post about Mozilla software in 2006. I used it for years, but boy was it a rough machine. It had a loud, shrill whine when the CPU was idle, to the point where the “fix” was to run a shell script that chewed up just enough battery power to shut it up. I remember being on a call with an Apple rep in Crows Nest at the time, and they were well aware of the issue, and… unconcerned. Maybe they’d been to too many concerts and couldn’t hear it when it was reproduced for them. The cooling system was never great either; I ended up repasting it a few years later and the results were embarrassingly better. The screen inverter died, the MagSave port was flaky, both fans eventually needed replacing. My first, and one of my only YouTube videos, was about this! Very strange for a laptop that was never dropped or manhandled.

Just like the first Intel iMac, this MacBook Pro was also among the only Macs released with Intel’s Core Duo CPU; no, not Core 2 Duo. The Core Duo was 32-bit silicon, meaning we were artificially limited by what we could run almost from the start. I believe it was a year later when Apple released a Core 2 Duo-based machine, and we lost support for Mac OS X a few years later. Even many Apple fans seem oblivious to this oddity in Apple’s lineup, given how people thought Apple moved permanently to 64-bit CPUs starting with the G5.

That said, is a phrase with two words. Mac OS X had its golden era on the Intel platform. The best versions of the OS were released during this time, which perhaps says more about modern macOS than anything else. The last great, serviceable desktop Mac—the original Mac Pro—also sported Intel CPUs.

We’re spoiled in many ways with how good Apple Silicon MacBook hardware is now. No PC laptops that I’m aware of can match their weight, 2× HiDPI screens, battery life, and performance. I had an 11-inch Intel MacBook Air I miss dearly, but it was a slouch compared to my desktops at the time. If only their software and services didn’t continue to slide from okayish, to mediocre, to baffling, to embarrassing.

Anyway! A bit of a shaggy dog story about a retired architecture for your Sunday morning. Just be thankful I didn’t wax lyrical about PowerPC.