I would say in this day and age, extremely important because the security issues aren't just with using public wifi. They are often vulnerabilities that are accessible via the internet regardless of how you access the internet.
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When will Intel mac users be "forced" to upgrade to silicon Macs?
- Thread starter msackey
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Not even close. Given that the Intel MBP just left retail, it will be supported for at least the next 3-4 OS releases, especially if existing Pro users wait to upgrade due to needing all of their apps and plugins to be updated first.
Not sure where you get the 12/5/2031 date for Windows 11. Microsoft hasn't stated an end of support date for it yet.
Trending.
Since 2007 with Win Vista EOL has been 122 months. So For Win 11 it is very likely it will end by that date.
It is of course possible they lengtehn it to 151 months like of 2001 Win Xp.
Honestly I have 2010 computers (a 2010 Mac Pro tower) that still works just fine and is still really speedy, it just doesn't get the newest OS. As long as you're ok with not having the newest OS your computer will last a long time.
I personally jumped to the M series chips due to the insane battery life they get + the performance. It's incredible what Apple pulled off but if you're just doing office work, aside from battery you're not going to really notice much.
My guess is as long as your machine doesn't crap out on you you'll at least get a few more good years with it.
I personally jumped to the M series chips due to the insane battery life they get + the performance. It's incredible what Apple pulled off but if you're just doing office work, aside from battery you're not going to really notice much.
My guess is as long as your machine doesn't crap out on you you'll at least get a few more good years with it.
I’m surprised how quickly battery can drain even with office work. Most of our work is done on the web using what I suppose are web apps (?). I don’t know if that makes it more power hungry than is they were just regular websites.
Web has gotten extremely piggy as of late when it comes to system resources. Web devs add so much unnecessary garbage unfortunately.
That being said you will notice a huuuuge difference if you upgrade to an M series. I work in Xcode almost all day and under Intel chips, I would get maybe 3 hours tops on battery. On M series I don’t even know how much I get because I can go usually two days, sometimes more before I need to charge my laptop.
Off-topic, but there is no way we get 2nm by 2025. We'll be on M3 3nm by then and also the following M4 will still be based on 3nm.
As for the rest of the topic, I did some math and shockingly you're right, 2017 MBPs will be out of security updates by 2025.
That's downright shameful for a company selling itself as eco-friendly.
In my household I still have one 2013 MBA being used for light productivity and one 2012 ASUS crapper laptop (Core i3, entry level even for its time) still operational as a server.
Both still get their security updates and the ASUS will outlive the Apple unless I'm switching the MBA to Windows.
Anybody interested in that should research Windows 10 IoT LTSC, it will run on pretty much anything under 15 years old and will get security updates until Jan 13 2032 (!).
Also no bloatware unlike other Windows versions.
2 nm process - Wikipedia
2013 MBA will get its final macOS Security Update this year.
2015 Win10 will have its EOL by Oct 2025.
What's the catch though?
Regarding the CPU process, according to your infographic, we should've gotten to 3nm in 2022... obviously it didn't go that way.
Regarding Windows LTSC... well... you'd need a Windows 10 Enterprise product key. Not exactly Walmart material. But if you take care of that, it's the ultimate Windows OS, it has been my daily driver on every Wintel PC I had on my hands since 2015.
That’s incredible. Apple should support older versions of macOS with security updates
That's also an extremely pared down version of Windows aimed specifically at managing IOT devices, rather than a full-featured OS. Some features present in a normal build of Windows will not be present in the IOT version.
Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC is a full featured desktop OS.
You're probably mistaken with Windows 10 IoT Core.
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I'm wondering if Apple will stay with Apple Silicon indefinitely (until the Mac is replaced by whatever is next), or will Apple transition to another CPU at some point in the future? Could Apple sign a new deal with Intel, or perhaps go with AMD? Could they fix their relationship with NVIDIA and use them instead?
They're hiring RISC-V programmers, so they're at least looking into it.
RISC-V High Performance Programmer - Careers at Apple
Apply for a RISC-V High Performance Programmer job at Apple. Read about the role and find out if it’s right for you.
Just this morning, in my office pantry I took an Intel i9 16" nearby to just browse and showed some stuff to colleagues, not even YouTube videos or Chrome just using Safari. In less than an hour the battery was already at 80%-ish.
If I take the M1 Pro 16", in order to drop more than 10% in an hour I would have needed to be hammering it with Lightroom HDR merge or video exporting. If I did the same stuff this morning with it the battery would drop to 98% at worst.
Apple has a track record of being hamstrung by third party CPUs. They had the issues with the PowerPC G5 and not being able to use them in laptops, then Intel and its CPUs running hot, which limited which CPUs Apple could use in their hardware designs. Apple has been manufacturing their own A series SoCs for years, so the M series is just a building block on top of that. Where Apple has a major advantage is in the vertical integration of their SoCs, hardware, and software. That is something nobody else is doing in the personal computing space. While Samsung does do this in select markets where they use their own Exynos SoC in their flagship phones instead of Qualcomm, that is the exception rather than a rule.
That's a great explanation. If I recall, the move from 680X0 processors to PowerPC was because 680X0 were not keeping up with the speed and development of Intel chips and the move to RISC architecture would help Apple. It seems that story repeated and so Apple moved to Intel chips.
I had a mid 2005 iBook 12" 130nm that I purchased knowing that Apple was moving to Intel 65nm in January 2006.
It was a correct purchase that I should have brought with me to FL as the early 2008 MBP 15" 45nm I was buying arrived by March.
I think it was bigger than that. 68K was used by a lot of things that were not IBM PC-compatibles in the 1980s, e.g. Sun boxes, etc. The general view at the time was that CISC was a dead end and the future was RISC, and the *NIX workstation folks who likely sold the highest-priced 68K systems switched to their own RISC processors (SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, etc) first. That probably became somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy - with people abandoning 68K, Motorola slowed down/abandoned 68K development, etc. (Look at how few things used 68060s compared to 68020/68030/68040s)
Apple did not want a 'bespoke' RISC architecture (and worried that Motorola's 88K RISC architecture didn't really have any other major customers), so they thought that by partnering with IBM and Motorola on PowerPC, there would be a big ecosystem of non-Apple devices, e.g. IBM machines running various OSes, CHRP machines running Windows NT, etc, using PowerPC.
What no one anticipated at the time, I think, are five things:
1) Intel's massive scale/R&D/etc effectively let them engineer their way out of the presumed-dead-endedness of CISC/x86. So DOS/Windows/"PC compatible" land never had to transition away from x86 as many of the CISC naysayers expected.
I suspect that IBM/etc expected that x86 would hit a dead end, x86 buyers would be forced to look at something else, and PowerPC desktops from IBM would be a strong contender. Even if Windows remained popular, well, they had Windows NT for PPC...
2) Not only did x86 not hit a dead end, but in fact, due to economies of scale, Intel's manufacturing edge, etc, x86 started to pull ahead in performance. The RISC guys were beating x86 in the early-mid 90s; by the early 2000s, at least on the desktop/workstation side, x86 was faster and significantly cheaper.
3) The other expected applications for PowerPC basically went nowhere. Some PowerPC chips were used in IBM servers/workstations, but otherwise, PowerPC effectively became the bespoke architecture that Apple didn't want. The brave new world of a gazillion IBM boxes running OS/2 or Windows NT on PPC never happened.
4) Worse than that, non-server/non-embedded applications for PowerPC never materialized. This is what led to the disaster of the G5 - sure, IBM had a faster more modern PowerPC CPU that it could offer, but it had a server-grade power envelope. And no one wanted to make Apple a modern PowerPC processor for laptops, at least at a price point Apple was willing to pay.
5) The ever-increasing cost of building new fabs for smaller processes. It's not clear to me whether Motorola/Freescale, for example, had the volume to keep up with Intel/AMD-IBM-etc in the 2000s. And unlike in the 2020s where the foundries like TSMC/Samsung are at the cutting edge of semiconductor manufacturing, that wasn't the case in 2000-2005.
So... especially at a time when Apple had no in-house processor design expertise, Apple needed someone to design and fabricate a low-power processor on a cutting-edge manufacturing process, and to do so at a per-unit cost that made sense for iBooks. And that wasn't going to be either Freescale or IBM.
Meanwhile, Intel had come to their senses after the Pentium 4/HotBurst debacle and was re-optimizing their whole lineup around power efficiency, which is exactly what an increasingly-laptop-focused Apple needed. Didn't hurt that Intel also offered ready-made chipsets for memory controllers, I/O, storage, etc - things Apple largely had to design on their own for PPC.
And, I would add one additional thing - switching to Intel would let Apple differentiate itself with design and software and effectively take hardware out of the equation. No more 'oh, RAM type X is now half the price per megabit of RAM type Y, but our memory controller doesn't support RAM type X so we need to spend twice as much as the other guys for the same amount of RAM for another year while our team works on a new memory controller for type X RAM'-type dilemmas. A 2006/7-era MacBook was very, very similar internally to a Dell laptop... and that meant that they could ride the same trends on component types/pricing/etc. Even the 16:10 displays used at the time were not Apple-unique. Over time, of course, Apple ended up settling on the higher end of the Intel component ecosystem while Dell and co, at least on their consumer machines, focused on the low end...
(What's interesting, of course, is how Apple silicon now flips all of this upside down... largely by leveraging the smartphone economy's massive economies of scale, Apple is now back at something completely custom, but something custom that is basically guaranteed to stay ahead of the x86 Windows world.)
How long will the last Intel Macs be supported? macOS Sonoma gives us some hints
Nearly 20 years of data show how Intel Macs are faring as Apple switches chips.
arstechnica.com
Easy answer:
So, whenever that date is, you know that you won't be able to buy an Intel Mac and get support for it and you will be "forced" to buy an Apple Silicon Mac because:
- when Apple officially labels the last of the Intel Macs as "obsolete"
So, whenever that date is, you know that you won't be able to buy an Intel Mac and get support for it and you will be "forced" to buy an Apple Silicon Mac because:
- there won't be any new Macs with an Intel CPU in it
- you won't be able to get an Intel Mac repaired officially by Apple or from its repair network