What are you still using an Intel Mac for?

[fatTribble]

What about you? What are you still using an Intel Mac for that won't work on an Apple Silicon Mac?

Nothing. I have a 2018 MacBook Pro 4TB. I just don’t have a need for a new MacBook yet. I have disk space left and I’ll get the new Sequoia update this fall. I mostly just use the basic apps like Safari, Mail, Photos, etc. I have a lot in Photos so I get the larger drive so I can keep everything local and backup with Time Machine.

 

[MBAir2010]

I went from a couple decades of racing to watching only, as the hostile & inattentive driving + lack of penalties for killing people (as long as you use a car to do it) has led to such a high death rate that riding a bike or taking a walk in the country has become a deathwish over the last couple decades. I asked my local shop a few years back for the tip on the best open training rides in the area and their reaction was “No one’s done that since the nineties, it’s way too dangerous.” I can’t even remember the last time I’ve seen anyone doing it.
Thankfully Cyclingtorrents.nl exists, and though it takes a little to get up & running, brings coverage of cycling events to the US.

and those cellphone drivers did not make things safer this century.
yes drivers are horrible by the year,

i was swooooshed by a car who needed their right lane on a 2 lane road in a golf course-gated community area were there are hardly cars, other than that the ride was safe.
in the 1980s i would race down Broadway in Manhattan 18 miles towards the GW bridge.
that was crazy!

 

[audiophilosophy]

iTunes. I have no interest in renting my music library. I like to own it. I have been a bit of an iTunes “power user” for well over 10 years now. I am sticking with Mojave for iTunes. The Apple Music Mac app has some “features” that I find unacceptable. Specifically, I don’t like the way it takes me out of the spreadsheet “songs” view when conducting a search. iTunes does not do that. That’s huge for me and my “workflow” when listening, enjoying, and curating my music collection.

 

[CraigJDuffy]

I would re-phrase that as: What can you do on your Apple silicon Mac that I can't do on my Intel 2019 iMac?

Go 18 hours on a single charge?

 

[turbineseaplane]

iTunes. I have no interest in renting my music library. I like to own it. I have been a bit of an iTunes “power user” for well over 10 years now. I am sticking with Mojave for iTunes. The Apple Music Mac app has some “features” that I find unacceptable. Specifically, I don’t like the way it takes me out of the spreadsheet “songs” view when conducting a search. iTunes does not do that. That’s huge for me and my “workflow” when listening, enjoying, and curating my music collection.

If you ever choose to, you can move past Mojave and still use iTunes thanks to Retroactive

I'm on Ventura & Monterey on my machines (but had used Sonoma as well) and it works perfectly on all of them

 

[noannualfee]

I have a maxed out 18-core iMac Pro which I still use for Final Cut Pro and Photoshop. Still an amazing machine and very fast.

 

[turbineseaplane]

This thread is really great

It really warms my soul to see so many posting about how great and useful their Intel Macs continue to be

There is no need to be rush upgrading to ASi machines when what we have and use continues to offer such great performance, flexibility and value.

Bravo everyone!

 

[fuchsdh]

Still doing all my work on my 2018 Mac mini with an eGPU. I do have a lot of 32-bit games and stuff I'd like to keep access to, so I'm still debating what my situation will be for that when I do upgrade to (probably) a Mac Studio. An iMac Pro if I get it for the right price would be a nice Mojave legacy machine.

I have a 2017 iMac 27" with 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD. It's still very fast.

Yep, we still are mostly using 2017 iMacs (64GB, 1TB SSD) at my office. They're probably going to get replaced starting next year as they fall out of support, which might be when I snag one as an alternate to my plan above. They're definitely slow in some instances but mostly we're still cutting 1080p video so they're pretty serviceable.

iTunes. I have no interest in renting my music library. I like to own it. I have been a bit of an iTunes “power user” for well over 10 years now. I am sticking with Mojave for iTunes. The Apple Music Mac app has some “features” that I find unacceptable. Specifically, I don’t like the way it takes me out of the spreadsheet “songs” view when conducting a search. iTunes does not do that. That’s huge for me and my “workflow” when listening, enjoying, and curating my music collection.

Yeah I briefly used the apps that allowed you to keep using iTunes, but it ultimately broke another MacOS update later. Apple Music is definitely not an improvement if you're primarily using your own music library locally.

 

[Boyd01]

iTunes.

I have a lowly base 1.4ghz/4gb 2014 Mini that just runs iTunes with homesharing 24/7. There's over 2tb of of media on a 4tb USB SSD, including about 1200 ripped DVD's that I watch on two AppleTVs and other devices. That Mini is also connected to my home stereo with speakers in different rooms. Also a growing quantity of iTunes movie purchases, all downloaded to that Mac.

There's a thread here about how downloading movies with the TV app now results in files in a new format that has compatibility issues. Downloading them with iTunes in Mojave avoids this issue - another reason I stay with it.

However, I fear we're living on borrowed time here. Someday, Apple will no doubt pull the plug and break downloading content with iTunes, they did this for the Apple TV 3 last year - the hardware still works but you can no longer log into iCloud, so no access to your purchased content.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Yeah I briefly used the apps that allowed you to keep using iTunes, but it ultimately broke another MacOS update later. Apple Music is definitely not an improvement if you're primarily using your own music library locally.

I keep one machine to run Mojave for compatibility with legacy software, and he rest of the time I'm not using it for that it's the iTunes jukebox with a pair of 8TB SSDs in it. When it was still in development it was a frequent source of irritation because it couldn't really do all the things well that it was being tasked to do. But since video went to the incompatible h.265, I've just pulled the non-music media types out of it and use iina for those, so now that I'm just using iTunes for music, it's actually pretty great, managing tags & custom artwork, integrating with devices well, and protected from updates screwing everything up bc it's safely EOL'd.

 

[MBAir2010]

Ahh yes ITunes!
I ditched my iPhone 12 mini for my 2010 itouch g4 due to Itunes being better for me than  Musik.

 

[vonlost]

Just for its 27” screen. I’ll be forced to a smaller Apple silicon iMac when Intel is no longer supported by MacOS.

 

[Boyd01]

Another thing I do on the 2018 Mini is run MacOS Mountain Lion and Sierra VM's. I have several thousand dollars of legacy CAD and 3d software that I used professionally before retirement in 2011. Updating those was just the cost of doing business back then, but I really can't justify that anymore. I don't use that software much anymore, but still need it a few times a year. And they actually run much faster in a VM than they ever did natively on my old Macs!

I don't think this can be done on Apple Silicon with any kind of decent performance/stability, can it?

 

[skeptech]

I still use a 2019 Mac Pro (16c, w5700x GPUs, 192GB RAM) as my primary desktop system and server for my documents & media - I am hugely disappointed & annoyed that Apple has not retained support for error correction code (ECC) random access memory (RAM) in its "pro" systems. This points to a disregard for issues of both computer reliability and data integrity.

I wasn't terribly surprised that when the Apple Silicon Mac Pro shipped without ECC RAM because that followed suit - nothing else Apple ships is designed for full data integrity checking either. Makes me wonder about their Apple Silicon servers in iCloud and for their Apple Intelligence platforms: how reliable are they?

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

https://arch.cs.utah.edu/arch-rd-club/dram-errors.pdf

Remember: every time your computer reads data from stable storage into unmonitored RAM, manipulates it, and writes it back, the data might have new bit errors written back to stable storage. This can be devastating for both compressed data (might not uncompress correctly) and encrypted data (might not decrypt again properly) - it's not just a matter of flipped bits in software that might cause an obvious program crash or a kernel crash - silent data corruption might not be noticed for years.

On that note, I find it interesting that iOS 18 Adds 'Recovered' Album in Photos to Restore Lost or Damaged Photos and Videos just yesterday …

 

[Addicted2Apples]

This post might belong in a different forum (so, apologies to the mods in advance). But, in the spirit of the Intel to Apple Silicon Mac transition, I'll pose the following question:

For those still holding onto Intel-based Macs (however old or recent they may be), what are you still using your Intel-based Mac for? What are you doing/using with yours that cannot be done on an Apple Silicon Mac using Rosetta 2?

What about you? What are you still using an Intel Mac for that won't work on an Apple Silicon Mac?

Hi all, newbie MacRumors user here, (though long-time watcher of the site since 2007):

I am still (to this day) using my Early 2011 13-inch MacBook Pro (MacBookPro8,1), with upgraded 16GB DDR3-1333MHz RAM, and a 2TB OWD SSD.

What do I use it for?
Well, I still use Adobe Photoshop, and I completely refuse to use the Adobe CC Subscription model of their software, so I make all my Graphic Designs / personal art on Adobe Photoshop CS5. And it's still chugging along.

I usually make Graphic Design projects ranging from 24x24 inches to 36x36 inches at 360 ppi and every size in-between. (I have 3 cameras I use for my art: (Nikon D850, Z6II+Z7II)

The other (hopefully more-sane reason for refusing to upgrade to the current Apple Silicon Mac Laptops, is they refuse to give them USB-A (other than the Mac Studio and Mac Pro) and there's literally nothing stopping them from giving it USB3.2-speed USB-A (20Gbit/s). Fun fact: the data transfer speed of the iPhone 15 Pro is the same speed as Thunderbolt 1 (found on my computer) (10Gbit/s / 1.25GB/s). Here's to hoping for fast USB-A on the next Macs with M5 and for the love of god give it Thunderbolt5 with (80-120Gbit/s) for the love of god!

Other Apple Devices I currently own in case you're interested:
iPad Pro 12.9-inch 2018 (3rd-Generation) (2.49GHz 8-Core) 1TB SSD & 6GB LPDDR4X-2133MHz RAM
2013 Mac Pro (3.0GHz 8-Core) 2TB Storage (1TB SSD by Apple + 1TB SSD by OWC) & 128GB DDR3-1600MHz ECC RAM
Other Apple Devices I owned in the past:
2006 Mac Pro (2x 2.66GHz "Quad-Core", 2TB SSD by OWC & 16GB DDR2-667MHz ECC RAM)
2001 Titanium PowerBook G4 (500MHz) 30GB HDD Storage & 1GB PC100 SDRAM

I hope my next iPad Pro will be the M5-based one with 24GB or 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM (3750MHz or 4266MHz) and I hope it comes in a bigger 14-inch size and has Mac-Style MagSafe charging, but that's a topic for another day.

 

[0423MAC]

Personally I like trying to find uses for old hardware. I am particularly fond of the late 2008 MacBook and just shoehorned Windows 11 recently. It runs fine for the most part, but the CPU struggles with anything more than a single heavy application open at the same time.

As far as Intel Macs in general go all Pre retina macbooks are extremely versatile machines. Assuming you don't care about the optical drive you can swap that out for an additional SSD and could even boot RAID 0 on older versions of macOS.

Tons of linux distros work great and the fact that Apple took their time with the design not only on the exterior of the MacBooks, but the trackpad in particular makes using these things so much better than a similarly aged notebook from that era.

 

[0423MAC]

Since I had a little time today. Here is a maxed out Alienware gaming laptop from late 2008 side by side with a late 2008 MacBook running windows 11. The Alienware is indeed faster, but it comes in at nearly 13lbs with the massive power brick compared to just under 5lbs for the MacBook.

Better user experience? The MacBook. Much longer battery life and the fan doesn’t go out of control by just opening up the start menu. Trackpad on the Alienware is awful, fingerprint works but obviously not nearly as good as modern sensors. Always fun to revisit some of these things many years later. IMO for most users the MacBook was the way to go, but obviously gamers would have enjoyed the dual Radeon graphics inside the Alienware…playing games at max volume or headphones since the fans are unbearably loud under any load.

 

[jent]

I bought a nearly top-of-the-line Intel 13" MacBook Pro (four ports) a week after the Apple Silicon announcement, because I basically had to spend the work funds by the end of the quarter and the first Apple Silicon Macs didn't come out until November 2020, some five months after the transition was announced. It's still going strong enough that I don't have any need to replace it yet.

Might as well as a tangential question while we're on it; I use two external monitors in addition to the MBP's screen. What's the current state of play with Apple Silicon laptops and the maximum number of external displays?

 

[dmccloud]

Well, I think most, if not all, of what I do on my Intel Mac (6,1 Mac Pro) can indeed be done on a Silicon Mac, which begs the question, what can be done on an Apple Silicon Mac that cannot be done on an Intel Mac? We all have different needs, but for Music my trash can is still a more than a decent computer, and for my wallet too.

The biggest thing I keep hearing is related to audio production and certain plugins that will not run on ARM-based systems at all because of the lack of 32-bit support. This is also why there are a lot of Steam games for Mac which will not run on Apple Silicon Macs. To be fair, this is not exclusive to either Mac OS or Apple as a whole - the software situation for ARM-based Windows machines is even more confusing.

 

[Darren.h]

Intel Macs are totally upgradable and repairable by the user.

the glorified Mac mini or Mac Studio with Apple silicon is not. not repairable by the user. not upgradable. Apple has you by the $alls on repair bills.

I have a 2019 Mac Pro. The Last Beast of a computer. all 50 pounds of it.

 

[Bokito]

My main Mac is a 2013 27” iMac all maxed out (3.5GHz i7, 1TB SSD, 32GB RAM, 4GB GeForce 780m GTX). It still runs everything flawlessly. It’s still possible to use if for the heavy lifting. It can play 8K video, even though nobody was talking about that when the machine was launched. Games run still run good on it (the graphics card was one of the best Apple ever added to a Mac in terms of relative performance).

I’m only now upgrading my main OS to Monterey (not officially supported) as I kept on to Mojave for compatibility reasons for too long to get a few more years out of it.

The machine was prices really nice too. € 4000,- including taxes. To get a Mac Studio all maxed out with a Studio Display nowadays I would have to pay 3 times that amount and I would have outdated specs.

 

[Sippincider]

What are you doing/using with yours that cannot be done on an Apple Silicon Mac using Rosetta 2?

Enjoying a 27” iMac screen.

 

[Yimbaz]

What a silly question. The first Apple Silicon Macs came out less than four years ago. A lot of Intel Macs are still working just fine, and there's no reason to upgrade your laptop if it still works.

 

[Grumpus]

If you ever choose to, you can move past Mojave and still use iTunes thanks to Retroactive

I'm on Ventura & Monterey on my machines (but had used Sonoma as well) and it works perfectly on all of them

Retroactive's author now warns of limited support and urges the use of other software.

My own home-made iTunes 12.9.5 setup, based on scripts published here on MR by @bogdanw and others, works very well under Monterey and up on my old 2019 Intel MBA, but crashes immediately after startup on my new M3 MBP.

I couldn't come up with a solution, so I gave up and re-installed Mojave on the 2019 MBA and am now using that exclusively for iTunes. This turns out to have been a good move. It works well and reliably, certainly much better than the post-Mojave replacement apps. As a bonus, I can now restore an iPod without hanging the whole damn machine (but that's a rant for another day).

 

[TVreporter]

2019 27-inch iMac for everything - browsing, writing, photo editing (personal not pro work).

I don't want a 24-inch screen and the Canadian prices for all Apple products are ridiculous these days. It keeps chugging along just fine - 40 GB Ram helps — and if they ever come out with a 27-inch M iMac I'll eventually get one and pass this Mac to my kids.

Or OP if you want to buy me a new M3 iMac, just let me know!