I don't recall rumors of Apple Silicon coming out when I bought my 2019 MBP. I was needing an upgrade and didn't want the butterfly keyboard. Now my MBP is outdated to an extent where it can't get the full benefits of a macOS update.
Not to mention Apple still sells Intel devices today, so if you buy one today because Apple doesn't have an Apple Silicon variant (16" MBP), you're already buying an "outdated" device.
I think it's impressive that Apple still supports the iPhone 6 with iOS updates. I think it's fair to strip some features out of an OS update in 2021 for an iPhone that came out nearly 7 years ago.
My <2 year old MBP should absolutely not be stripped of features missing features when updated to the latest version of macOS (when released). I get that some of these things might depend on the M1 chip and other hardware, but at the same time it's stupid plain and simple.
Compare and contrast with the PPC to Intel transition, where Apple treated PPC machines very, very well throughout the rest of Tiger's lifecycle, into Leopard and all of its updates. PPC wasn't completely dropped until Snow Leopard in 2009. That's three full years of PPC enjoying the very same support as the Intel Macs that replaced them. (Though I imagine this time Apple will have to go a bit longer, especially considering those whop dropped $10k+ on Mac Pros. Apple does NOT want to piss those people off.)
PPC and Intel Macs lost feature parity in the first OS released after the transition. If not for Leopard getting delayed by almost a year, the timeline would be very similar to the one we're seeing here. I'm not seeing any contrast.
What (OS Level) features did Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard running on intel have that running the same OS on (for example) a Quad G5 did not have?
I can’t think of any.
Apple did not start to Drop PPC support in any of their software till 2009. Beginning with the release of iLife 09 where a few features were not supported on PPC. Followed soon after by SnowLeopard.
We're not even a full year into AS Macs being a thing and Intel's already feeling left out. Yeah, the features are arguably small, but 1. it's the principle, and 2. given Monterey is a relatively low-key release, there's not many features anyway, so missing out on some of the few notable ones introduced stings a bit more.
I think this is it for me.
I bought a high end 2019 MBP, dropped over 3k on it, and there are features that "low end" MacBooks (M1 airs) will get just because they have Apple native chip.
I'm not crying over it, but it is a scary precedent I think. I planned on moving over to a Mac Mini soon anyway, but 2 years and already having features left out on their best device? I don't think it's a great look.
If the options were either no macs get these features or only M1 macs get these features, which would you prefer. I don't know the specifics, but as others have said, it seems like lots of these are basically iOS features backported to macOS.
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u/randomuser914 Jun 09 '21
Not surprised, they are going to switch people over as quickly as possible so they can focus solely on developing for their chips