‘round
the web, I’m seeing people react to Intel Macs getting left out of
macOS Ventura’s featureset, and in response to people justifiably tilted
about it, I see a trend: People saying “if you’re surprised by this,
you don’t remember the PowerPC to Intel transition”.
Oh boy! I do! And it wasn’t as bad as these people think it is.
Apple
announced the Intel transition in 2005. The last PowerPC Mac to ship
was a speed bumped G5 in 2006, replaced by the Mac Pro that same year.
The
last OS to support PowerPC was Leopard, aka 10.5. At the time, Apple
was on a two-year cadence with their OS releases. Panther released in
2003, Tiger in 2005, Leopard in 2007, Snow Leopard in 2009, and finally
Lion in 2011 before switching to the yearly cadence we’re on today.
However, things were also different back then in that you paid for
your OS upgrades. As such, Apple also had to look after previous OSes
more aggressively than they do now and keep them up to speed with other
software releases (like iTunes).
Because of this there was also less incentive for developers to aggressively drop older versions of Mac OS.
Due
to this (and possibly Leopard being the final version of Mac OS that
PowerPC machines saw), Leopard saw software support all the way until
2012. Security updates, updates for things like iTunes, Safari so on and
so forth.
Something to keep in mind too is that Leopard actually
supported a wide range of machines and kept them “current” until that
2012 cutoff. Leopard at a minimum requires an 867MHz PowerPC G4,
something that could be easily bought as far back as 2002.
Leopard
brought with it a whole slew of features and a lot of quality of life
improvements that shaped Mac OS into what it is today. And as far as I
remember, PowerPC machines didn’t really miss out on any of the major,
headlining features. You still got Stacks, you still got the new Dock,
you still got Spaces, so on and so forth. And since Snow Leopard
famously boasted about not having new features…I’d consider 2011′s
Lion to be when PowerPC started truly missing out on new gubbins.
So,
if we consider worst case scenario here: Someone who bought a G5 in
2006 would have seen 5-6 years of “support” before their Mac started
missing out on new features. (And even then, some stuff in Lion–like
Safari 5–were brought backward to Leopard.)
Comparing that to what Ventura is doing, one has to consider that Apple is still selling an Intel Mac as we speak: The Mac Pro. When the PowerPC transition was “done” and Snow Leopard released, Apple was very much into the Intel era and no longer actively selling PowerPC Macs. PowerPC Macs didn’t actively start feeling like second class citizens until (in my opinion) Lion.
Brief interpolation: It’s absolutely ridiculous that Apple has outright said that the Series 3 Apple Watch is not getting watchOS 9, but yet still sells it on its site as this article is being written. The S3 should have been killed last year, but continuing to take peoples’ money for a product that’s dropped from new OS releases as of this fall feels particularly scummy. Do better, Apple.
Yet, Intel Macs are already starting to feel like second class citizens even as the transition is still actively underway. The big boy MacBook Pros didn’t even get upgraded until late last year, so until then if you wanted something more than the 13″ MBP you had to buy an 16″ Intel model. And now those models are starting to miss out on features.
Another interpolation: There’s also the tale of the 2013 Mac Pro, which got dropped entirely from Ventura. What makes that kinda shitty is that Apple continued selling it all the way until 2019. So if you bought one fairly late, you just got boned. Or hell, even the 2017 MacBook Air! That was sold up until June 2019.
If we make this as favorable as we can to Apple, that’s about three years of support before Apple started considering Intel to be not worthy of some of these features. It would have been two if Apple had been able to get away from it, but user outcry over Monterey trying to pull that convinced Apple to let Intel in on the fun, too. It’s clear that Apple wants Intel gone, but it’s also clear that Apple’s arguably doing this way more aggressive than they did for the PowerPC transition.
In contrast to the last transition too, there also feels like more incentive now to aggressively drop old macOS versions and architectures due to 1. Free OS updates, and 2. Yearly cadence of updates. I feel like when the x86 architecture is dropped from macOS the Intel machines will be left behind far faster and more aggressively than the PowerPC transition. But of course, we’re not at that point just yet.