macOS 13 Minimum System Requirements Speculation

[Falhófnir]

While you could be right, the termination of the support for the 2014 MBP was right on schedule as expected for age. It was discontinued in 2015, so it's no surprise it didn't get Monterey in 2021.

If anything, the late 2013 MBP got support for longer than expected.

They might surprise by keeping all Monterey compatible Macs for another year (and then presumably dropping the 2015 and 2016 together with MacOS 14) but I feel like they want to shed the workload created by legacy Intel systems as fast as they can without upsetting people. At least there will hopefully be a couple of years' security support for Monterey so that would carry my 2015 almost to the 10 year mark still under some degree of support. I suppose the 2015 was still quietly sold until the 2018 models came out, it would be interesting to know how many are still in use and whether that would sway Apple's decision at all. They seem to have remained popular throughout the TouchBar era.

 

[MajorFubar]

The 2014 Mac mini with hard drive is basically unusable even back in Big Sur and earlier. It runs Monterey well (and officially) with 8 GB RAM and SSD though.

Yeah this is because hard drives and APFS do not work well together, so anything High Sierra and newer is going to suck salty balls if you use a hard drive.

 

[MajorFubar]

I suppose the 2015 was still quietly sold until the 2018 models came out, it would be interesting to know how many are still in use and whether that would sway Apple's decision at all. They seem to have remained popular throughout the TouchBar era.

Not saying this gives you an answer but the June 2012 non-retina 13" Macbook Pro was sold new for four years to October 2016, in fact it was so popular that when it was discontinued used prices went up. That didn't stop Apple from ostracising it with MacOS 11 when the youngest machines were only 4 years old.

 

[EugW]

The most at risk is that 15" MacBook Pro 2015 as you say, but IMO also the ones discontinued in 2017. OTOH, they would probably actually still continue to support the Mac Pro 2013 and the Mac mini 2014 in macOS 13, unless Apple changes its support pattern. That said, considering the Mac mini 2014 and Mac Pro 2013 are big anomalies, this would be a situation where changing the support pattern might make sense.

Big cull this year. Here are the system requirements.

macOS Ventura Drops Support for Older Macs, Works With 2017 and Later Machines

The new macOS Ventura software that was introduced today is compatible with many of the Macs that were able to run macOS Monterey, but it does drop...

www.macrumors.com

A full compatibility list is below:

iMac (2017 and later)
‌iMac‌ Pro
MacBook Air (2018 and later)
MacBook Pro (2017 and later)
Mac Pro (2019 and later)
Mac mini (2018 and later)
MacBook (2017 and later)

These are the Macs that were compatible with ‌macOS Monterey‌:

‌iMac‌ - Late 2015 and later
‌iMac‌ Pro - 2017 and later
‌MacBook Air‌ - Early 2015 and later
MacBook Pro - Early 2015 and later
‌Mac Pro‌ - Late 2013 and later
‌Mac mini‌ - Late 2014 and later
MacBook - Early 2016 and later

This is more aggressive than I was expecting. I was expecting them to support the 2017 MacBook Air and probably some others. It seems one hard cutoff is 10-bit hardware HEVC decode support.

I guess the good news is my primary machines, the 2017 iMac and 2017 MacBook, are still supported. As for my 2014 Mac mini, it's likely gonna get replaced at the M2 update anyway so no big deal.

 

[Andres Cantu]

I may be reading too much into this, but why would they remove the year and “or later” from the iMac Pro? Perhaps they really did end up canceling plans of a new one.

Also, why leave the same details for the MacBook, if the 2017 model is the latest one? Perhaps we’re getting a new regular MacBook model in the Spring?