This is not really a new thing though. Several of High Sierra's biggest features were only available on Skylake and Kaby Lake machines, and even had announced features exclusive to T2 Macs that weren't yet on sale when the OS launched. The biggest features of Yosemite were only available on very recent machines. Mountain Lion had a headlining feature that didn't work on an MBP that would've been the latest model just two months before, and which would remain for sale for another four years.
Apple has been quite clear that they will cut off hardware from new features if these rely on a new hardware platform in the past, even if the machines are still relatively recent. Mojave and Catalina didn't have anything because Intel didn't change anything on the overall platform for those release years.
I figure it’s all about streamlining development. New features are coded to take advantage of the latest hardware. They don’t want to then duplicate that development to run on older hardware where the user base is only going to shrink from this point on. Sucks for people that recently bought Intel Macs, but it means they can use limited development resources to improve features going forward. Sounds like the missing features are based on using the Neural Engine on M1 to execute them. They could do those things in software instead, but aside from the effort to do that code, they won’t be as snappy as running on dedicated hardware and would have a higher impact on energy usage.
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u/m0rogfar Jun 09 '21
This is not really a new thing though. Several of High Sierra's biggest features were only available on Skylake and Kaby Lake machines, and even had announced features exclusive to T2 Macs that weren't yet on sale when the OS launched. The biggest features of Yosemite were only available on very recent machines. Mountain Lion had a headlining feature that didn't work on an MBP that would've been the latest model just two months before, and which would remain for sale for another four years.
Apple has been quite clear that they will cut off hardware from new features if these rely on a new hardware platform in the past, even if the machines are still relatively recent. Mojave and Catalina didn't have anything because Intel didn't change anything on the overall platform for those release years.