All in on M1 from Intel?

[dandeco]

Not me; even though in spring or summer 2022 I'll be buying my second Apple Silicon Mac (preferably an M1 Pro-equipped desktop), I still want to have at least one Intel Mac handy for certain tasks. Of course, I have taken up collecting Macs from over the past several years, so aside from my M1 MacBook Air I also currently have seven Intel Macs on hand made between 2006 and 2012 (two desktops and four laptops) and even three functional PowerPC Macs (two desktops and one laptop, all G4 models) for if I want to do something that requires a PowerPC Mac.

 

[Kierkegaarden]

Not me; even though in spring or summer 2022 I'll be buying my second Apple Silicon Mac (preferably an M1 Pro-equipped desktop), I still want to have at least one Intel Mac handy for certain tasks. Of course, I have taken up collecting Macs from over the past several years, so aside from my M1 MacBook Air I also currently have seven Intel Macs on hand made between 2006 and 2012 (two desktops and four laptops) and even three functional PowerPC Macs (two desktops and one laptop, all G4 models) for if I want to do something that requires a PowerPC Mac.

Good grief — sounds like your Mac Museum would be much more interesting than mine! If you have the room, and the trade in value would be zero, it probably makes sense to keep them around if you still have software that runs on them. I still have an Apple IIgs, sans monitor, that I won’t part with.

 

[Kierkegaarden]

I have one program that I depend on that runs on Rosetta 2 but Apple will discontinue Rosetta 2 at some point and I will either require a Windows machine or an Intel Mac. The vendor has given no indication that they will port to Apple Silicon.

What is the program?

 

[Blue Quark]

I have one program that I depend on that runs on Rosetta 2 but Apple will discontinue Rosetta 2 at some point and I will either require a Windows machine or an Intel Mac. The vendor has given no indication that they will port to Apple Silicon.

Honestly, now's the chance to look for alternatives, if it's in any way possible, because sooner or later you're going to have to give up using that program. The sooner you move on to something else, the better.

I started out my tech enthusiast life being a Mac person. Now, mind you, I've been a desktop publisher and I've done (what would now be considered basic) multimedia work, and the other side of me (the tech enthusiast side) has done hands-on and over-the-phone tech support for Classic Mac OS, Mac OS X, and the various Microsoft offerings from MS-DOS through Windows XP, basic networking, and whatever other things my interests led me into, as well as hardware level troubleshooting and support for computers and all manner of peripherals. I've also built a series of PC desktops in addition to working for both authorized Mac dealer/servicers and a Fortune 100 major technology company supporting their PCs and other things.

However, in watching how things have evolved over the years within and outside of the technology world (and in other contexts) I came to the conclusion that closed-source and proprietary-licensed stuff was to be abandoned and avoided. Now, I'm not going to sit here and say that "I did all of this in a day" but I took it upon myself to learn about alternatives (this was made much easier because I grew up in the 80s when there was no "dominant" platform) and so I liberated all of my data and switched to Linux full time as of about 2016.

I still have my hand in things so that I can learn from first-hand experience what's new and changing, but I never want to be trapped again by any company. That's a large part of the reason I also left the world of CDMA-based cell phones for GSM, and why I used contract-free prepaid services. The feeling of liberation, whether related to computers or cell phones, was worth every second of effort I put into knowing that I needed to liberate myself and learning how to liberate myself.