It’s official: your Intel Mac won’t get macOS 27, with macOS Tahoe 26 marking the end of an era
- It’s been confirmed that Intel Macs won’t be supported with macOS 27
- Only four Mac models with Intel CPUs are supported by macOS Tahoe anyway, but that’ll be the final upgrade for those machines
- Those devices will at least receive security updates for a further three years
If you’ve got a Mac with an Intel CPU, we now know that macOS Tahoe 26 is the end of the line for your device (assuming that it supports macOS 26 in the first place, and you can check that here).
TechRadar can confirm that information on Intel compatibility was provided at the WWDC Platforms State of the Union keynote, and macOS Tahoe will be the last version of Apple’s desktop OS to support any Mac with an Intel processor.
Another way of putting this is that when macOS 27 arrives next year, it will only support Macs with Apple chips inside.
However, while Intel Macs that can run macOS Tahoe 26 will be stuck with that operating system, those machines will continue to get security updates for a further three years.
Analysis: That rushed out the door feeling
I had an inkling this might be coming, but I wasn’t fully convinced that Apple would actually push ahead and do this – or, perhaps more to the point, exclude MacBooks from as recently as 2020 with macOS Tahoe 26. It does feel like this hardware is being shoved out of the exit door a little hastily.
In fact, only a small number of Macs with Intel CPUs are good to go with macOS Tahoe: the MacBook Pro 16-inch from 2019, MacBook Pro 13-inch from 2020 – but only the higher-end model with four ports (not the entry-level laptop with two ports) – along with the Mac Pro from 2019, and iMac 27-inch from 2020.
Those Macs may be good for now, but they won’t get macOS 27, which will likely be announced and released next year, although at least they have a guarantee of three years of security updates going forward, to protect them against vulnerabilities popping up in the operating system that might be exploited.
So, those devices will be covered for updates until late in 2029 (assuming the three years start from the release of macOS 27), which is nine or 10 years of updates in total. And to be fair, that’s in line with the coverage Microsoft has provided with Window 10, which has had a decade of support (that ends in October, of course).
Of course, that wasn’t just security updates, but also new features, although the additions made to Windows 10 have been few and far between in recent times – but they’ve still kept coming.
Microsoft is facing its own controversy with Windows 11 upgrades, though, and the steeper hardware requirements that Windows 10 users face.
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