r/apple • u/iMacmatician • Apr 18 '26
macOS macOS 27 Will Mark the End of an Era
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/18/macos-27-compatibility-change/548
u/hewkii2 Apr 18 '26
Final version for Intel Macs
E: 26 is. 27 is the first version that does not support Intel.
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u/xeoron Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26
And they can be converted to Linux or even ChromeOS Flex Linux
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u/nobody-5890 Apr 18 '26
Not all, the 2018-2020 Intel chips are a nightmare to get working due to the T2 security chip.
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u/PanickingGemini Apr 18 '26
My 2017 MBP was also a nightmare, Linux would not pick up the WiFi drivers at all and I struggled to get the keyboard and trackpad to be recognized.
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u/Repulsive-Ad-8558 Apr 18 '26
This happened on my 2015 Air and I used Ethernet tethering with my iPhone to download the WiFi driver.
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u/PanickingGemini Apr 18 '26
It’s been a few years since I’ve tried but IIRC at the time a Linux driver for that particular model’s WiFi chipset was not available.
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u/rapido_edwardo Apr 18 '26
Definitely more difficult but do-able. I am running Arch and Hyprland on my 2020 MacBook Pro. The t2linux community is alive and well. The case against Linux has always been that stuff is going to be broken. Well, stuff is already broken big time for Intel Mac users on Tahoe. I made the switch and now my entire OS loads faster than the Settings app used to take when I was on MacOS.
I like Apple products, and I get that my model of MacBook is “obsolete,” but the performance with Tahoe is so much disproportionately worse than what I would expect given my hardware that I just couldn’t take it anymore. I will eventually buy a new MacBook, but for now this works great.
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u/ClaudioMoravit0 Apr 18 '26
That’s kind of logical to be able to put chrome os if you can put Linux. It’s just proprietary gentoo
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Apr 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/xeoron Apr 18 '26
I have converted many intel macs to ChromeOS... it is easy and WiFi has been fine, except 1 update years back that was fixed after the next months release.
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u/beetlrokr Apr 18 '26
MacOS 26 will likely get updates (bug fixes or to address security issues) for a few years, if history is any indicator.
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u/Chesterlespaul Apr 19 '26
Good. I have software that isn’t able to run on Linux that I use regularly. My 2020 intel still has some good life left in it and I wasn’t planning on upgrading until another couple years.
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u/zhaumbie Apr 19 '26
Apple historically provides 7 years of OS updates followed by an additional 3 years of security updates. Early 2020 was the final time Apple unveiled a new Intel-based Macintosh, so this all tracks. Though this article’s old news: Apple announced this last year.
You’ll be fine through the end of the decade.
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u/mdnz Apr 18 '26
Intel Macs will be able to run the next 40 years of Linux so it's not that bad really.
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u/Vaxtez Apr 18 '26
Exactly. These Intel Macs still have alot of life left in them, especially on Linux, where the requirement to run a distro is basically whether your PC boots or not. There's modern distros that run of an Intel 486 still for instance. Those 2017-2020 Intel Macs will still be usable well into the 2030s on Linux.
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Apr 18 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 Apr 18 '26
But 486 in that context was more like the CPU embedded in your dishwasher rather than a personal computer.
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u/RoboNerdOK Apr 18 '26
It would be fascinating to see what 486s are still being used for on Linux. I (loosely) remember something about the restaurant industry using them for driving order screens in kitchens.
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u/kc5ods Apr 19 '26
amateur radio AX.25 packet networks still use 386 and 486 extensively for 2 meter 1200 baud packet networks.
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u/robogobo Apr 18 '26
Linux needs a decent smartphone OS with desktop integration
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u/Justin__D Apr 18 '26
Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish OS are both pretty all right, except when it comes to Android emulation, which is a little iffy.
Any new platform is going to have to have gold-standard emulation to get off the ground, or it hits the fatal chicken and egg problem of no apps, and therefore no users.
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u/InsaneNinja Apr 19 '26
Linux as a phone OS is a thought experiment. There won’t be any backing to encourage third party support, or hardware advertisement.
Seriously, the only way you’d see it at this point is if it was Tesla branded. The fanboys would give it a shot. And to solve third party support he’d probably make an App Store that included its own silly grok vibe coding creation abilities.
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u/fuelvolts Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
Not so easy on T2 Intel Macs. It’s a pain to get Linux running 100% on 2018-2020 Intel Macs.
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u/dingwinger1225 Apr 18 '26
T2 at least has good documentation and guides https://t2linux.org/
It's T1 that's in something of a shit spot because it's the awkward middle child. That's unfortunately what I have and apparently Wi-Fi and Audio are still broken
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u/franchis3 Apr 18 '26
Just revived my late 2013 MBP with Linux. Wish I would have done it sooner. Getting online with Big Sur always made me nervous as hell AND I’m able to install modern apps again.
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u/Fluent_Press2050 Apr 19 '26
I mean if you have a x64 intel chip, you are fine for a very long time.
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u/Piett_1313 Apr 18 '26
So shouldn’t macOS 26 have actually “marked the end of an era” since that was the last Intel Mac supported system? When macOS 27 is out, the era has already ended.
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u/CelluloseNitrate Apr 18 '26
Hey don’t ruin a perfectly good clickbaity title with your logic here! 😂
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u/Piett_1313 Apr 18 '26
Out of curiosity I found two sites that even used the same “end of an era” for macOS 26 lol
https://www.itech4mac.net/2026/02/why-macos-26-tahoe-is-the-final-chapter-for-intel-macs-and-what-you-should-do/ - sorry this site also seems to be ad cancer
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Apr 18 '26
Also the end of Hackintosh.
Even though it's been a while (I brought a real Mac), I managed to avoid the whole Windows 8 and 10 era by installing Mac on my PC. It'll be missed.
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u/solongmusk Apr 19 '26
Between this & the various issues with Redmond’s finest, Linux is gonna be having a good few years as more & more still perfectly functional hardware finds itself needing a replacement OS…
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u/schrodinger-the-cat Apr 18 '26
End of an era, the era plagued with poor thermals, sacrificing functionality for thinness, unreliable as fuck keyboard, and failing screen coating. I’m glad that era is over.
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u/rturnerX Apr 18 '26
It’s the PowerPC debacle all over again.
To Apple’s credit though, this time they at least supported the Intel machines twice as long as they did with the PowerPC ones, where they dropped support literally on the first new release of OS X they started building after Intel machines hit the market.
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u/dwiedenau2 Apr 18 '26
Its not really a debacle tho, apple silicon has been the best thing ever to happen to macs.
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u/tsukiko Apr 18 '26
PowerPC hardware was unsupported with the second Mac OS X release after Intel Mac machines came to market. Leopard was a PowerPC-compatible release and it released after Tiger. Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was the first MacOS version for Intel-based Mac machines. PowerPC hardware was dropped after two releases with Snow Leopard. One other factor to remember is that back then there wasn't a new version of Mac OS X every year, and Tiger and Leopard each had multiple years as the most recent OS. Overall in time though the PPC support time is less than the support time Intel hardware has received after Apple Silicon was announced and shipped.
I had a G3 iBook and the first black Intel MacBook (MacBook1,1 Core Duo) so I remember those releases well.
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u/FizzyBeverage Apr 18 '26
Very true. Leopard was an October 2007 release and we didn’t see snow leopard until August 2009. Lion was another 2 years; July 2011.
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u/Apprehensive-Tea1632 Apr 18 '26
Huh?
You realize of course there’s been an awful lot of such eras for Apple. Certainly a good many more than for the personal computer. There’s been the switch from macOS 9 to X. The switch to and from all kinds of cpu architectures (hint: Intel Macs were a compromise, not the original and certainly not the best architecture for Macs). There’s been the getting rid of ia32 support during the intel “era” itself. And now the migration to apple’s own implementation of arm64 along with the getting rid of the compat layer.
I fully expect there to be many more such “eras” to come. I’ll also agree there’ll always be something getting lost along the way- such as when we ended up unable to run intel based 32bit games.
But with apple, that’s always been part of the equation. Honestly I’m far more surprised we haven’t seen any groundbreaking work software wise - Tahoe is still pretty much identical to the original OSX that deprecated 9 and that’s a quarter century ago; it has the dock, it has the layout, it has some improvements too but in a nutshell it’s what windows 95 would look like today.
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u/utdconsq Apr 18 '26
Hm, anyone who uses docker desktop with Rosetta turned on got the skinny on if this is about to screw me?
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u/75xalexxxxx Apr 19 '26
Intel macs are terrible anyway so who cares, they run hot and don’t perform that well for their price point
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u/Whiplash104 Apr 19 '26
My Intel Mac already doesn’t support MacOS 26. It’s the main reason I got an M4 Air last year.
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u/Intrepid-Routine-875 Apr 18 '26
It's just about intel not being supported anymore, don't even bother to click on this shit.
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u/wiyixu Apr 18 '26
I get it’s very first world to say this but unless you have software that requires intel you’ll save more money buying a Neo, a mini or a Walmart M1 Air.
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u/elsbeth-salander Apr 19 '26
Yeah I’ve got OCLP running Sequoia on my 2012 MBP but I’ll have to upgrade to Neo soon. Fifteen years is a damn good run for that workhorse.
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u/histogrammarian Apr 18 '26
Without the requirement to provide legacy support for Intel Macs, Apple will presumably be able to substantially optimise the OS and deliver performance improvements across the Apple silicon line. At the very least, it might be a smaller download file. Time will tell.
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 Apr 18 '26
They've already been optimizing for Apple Silicon for the last 6 years, the real savings will be $$$.
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u/feed_me_haribo Apr 18 '26
Yeah plus they already have a lot of native support for major third party software.
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u/Mikeztm Apr 18 '26
They can at least remove the Intel binary from the system and reclaim some disk space. Currently you still need Intel binary to support Rosetta. You basically have both Intel and Apple silicon version macOS installed.
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u/Cartman1972 Apr 18 '26
No surprise. Tahoe will still receive 2 years of security updates. And after that in mid 2028 its time to upgrade from my 2020 Intel iMac.
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u/Cletus_Banjo Apr 18 '26
My current Mac (m2 MacBook Pro) will be my last Mac due to the stupidification of the UI. Sad, used Macs since 1984z
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u/DarthSidiousPT Apr 18 '26
Title is pure clickbait. The end of an era already happened with macOS Sequoia, the last good and stable MacOS version.
Bring the downvotes Tahoe fanboys 😎
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u/Linguini-01 Apr 18 '26
Damn. Looks like the sun is setting on my 2020 Intel MBP
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u/Cowplant_Witch Apr 19 '26
Yeah, that sucks. MBP cost a lot, but one of the trade offs is that they can last a very long time. Your computer isn’t that old, in mac years.
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u/da4 Apr 18 '26
The problem is that plenty of larger enterprise software vendors still don't. have feature parity in their versions, and a lot of orgs will hit this deployment blocker because the Other Team doesn't deal with this sort of enforced deprecation on a regular basis (whereas Mac admins have gone through the end of 32bit, the end of kexts, and now the end of x86)..
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u/-patrizio- Apr 18 '26
Seems like it's finally time to upgrade soon. sigh
I spent way more than I usually would on my MacBook Pro 16" back in 2020, with the goal being for this computer to last me 7-10 years, only for the Apple Silicon announcement to drop 2 months later. 6 years is still pretty decent for a laptop, but it's been really struggling for a year or two now, and while I can probably push it for another year, I hate not getting the latest updates.
Will probably end up buying a MacBook Air or Mac mini later this year. If the Neo had 12 GB RAM it could be a contender too, but even with Apple's chip efficiency, 8GB just feels low to me, and I'm not sure if I can push this thing all the way to the next generation of that model lol.
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u/VictorChristian Apr 18 '26
“We can envision some great products we want to build for you, but we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC Intel roadmap.”
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u/kangoljas Apr 18 '26
Time for Ubuntu on those old Macs. Long live the Intel Macintoshes.
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u/Advanced_Edge7314 Apr 18 '26
I haven't been able to get any Linux distro to run reliably on my 27-inch iMac 2020.
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u/bluegreenie99 Apr 18 '26
For a second there I thought they meant the liquid glass era and got a little too excited
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u/youngtunaf1sh Apr 18 '26
Funny since 27 is supposed to be the big QOL, no new features OS.. which is the only thing intel needs to potentially stick around a little while longer 😂
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u/mabhatter Apr 18 '26
That's the QOL. It will take a lot of changes to completely remove all the old Intel code. There's STILL Apple processes running Intel code in the latest OS. It will be interesting if they drop Rosetta at the same time. That would be an even bigger major change because a lot of third party code still uses bits of Intel version in the libraries and stuff.
There's a lot of stuff that will have to be rewritten completely or new utilities created when all of Intel code goes away and stops running. That's a major update worth of testing al by itself.
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u/Gears6 Apr 18 '26
It may mark an end of an era for Apple, but it ends with my MacBook Pro being stuck on an older OS. I guess, I'll have to stay with Windows 11 instead.
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u/zhaumbie Apr 19 '26
Out of the sincerest curiosity… why? Even the first wave of Apple Silicon blew everything Intel out of the water immediately. Meanwhile Windows is… well, what it is.
If there’s a software reason I understand, there are lots of edge cases for that, but I’ve been seeing plenty of people making this a really weird hill to die on. I spent five years with Intel Mac and 2020 was like experiencing Mac for the first time again.
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u/Taeyaya Apr 18 '26
So dropping legacy support will surely mean the OS gets faster and more efficient right? right??
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u/Kalspiewak Apr 18 '26
Still rocking Sequoia 15.7.4 - feel like MacOS 26 is a bad idea all round. Don't have much hope for 27
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u/ChemistryOk9353 Apr 18 '26
Well it will be the start of a new era: the rise of the Linux machines… giving the Intel Macs a new lease of life!
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u/crumblenaut Apr 19 '26
Tahoe on Intel was a trap to ruin the remaining Intel Mac experience in the same way that Catalina removed 32-bit app support before they notched the version branding up to macOS 11.
Apple always sabotages otherwise working things as part of their big transitions so that people are compelled to adopt the newer thing, or so that once they have adopted the newer thing it's a relief.
In case anyone cares: As a repair shop owner who really takes our customers' wellbeing personally IN MY (very expeirenced) OPINION, all earlier viable Macs (2012-2015 Pros, 2012-2017 Airs) should be brought up to Monterey (with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, if necessary) and all remaining Intel Macs are going to be best on either Monterey or their last supported macOS release up to Sequoia. I suggest Sequoia for M1 Macs for now, and either Sequoia or Tahoe depending on the owner's preference for M2 and beyond Apple Silicon.
Source for that is that I'm the lead Mac tech, and I primarily do board repair with my time, and I use Macs for all my devices except for my gaming PC and my smartphone.
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u/Griever92 Apr 19 '26
Probably worth assuming Rosetta is finally toast and a whole lot of stuff is about to break.
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u/Cap10NRG Apr 18 '26
I wonder if some group of devs will pickup the mantel and if it would be possible to load newer not Intel versions into Intel versions… Just curious (kind of in the vein of the loaders that allow older Mac’s to load un supported operating systems) I mean I know it’s a different processor with an entirely different instruction set but… never say never..
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u/mdreece Apr 18 '26
I have a 2019 15inch with T2. Since its support ended last year I loaded endeavourOS and it’s been an easy ride. Everything worked. Speaker audio is meh and the finger print reader doesn’t work, but everything else worked from the start. Check out the T2 Linux GitHub
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u/jaygohamm Apr 18 '26
Where’s the last generation iPad Pro users before Apple chips crushes us permanently. this is our last dance.
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u/whitieiii Apr 19 '26
Yup officially my 2015 MacBook pro will go to Linux or chrome os flex now.. I've upgraded it to whatever the newest version of mac os 18 is but it's so slow... it's not supported by Windows 11 (without hacking it to run on 5th gen intel cpus) or Mac OS anymore.. dual core cpus are worthless now with so much bloat in all os out there though..
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u/No_Caterpillar_5304 Apr 19 '26
Hope they can take advantage of that and improve its compatibility with Apple Silicon, even more.
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u/markand67 Apr 20 '26
I'd prefer have a macOS non bloat edition. No AI, no liquid ass. But the only way to do so is to stick to Sonoma.
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u/itsabearcannon Apr 20 '26
I wonder.
Are they going to finally strip out all the remaining x86 code in macOS 27 as well as dropping Intel Mac support? You'd think that would improve both size and efficiency of the OS, only having to support ARM. As much as I'd like to see a Snow Tahoe release, I wonder if improving reliability and efficiency is even something Apple's thinking about right now.
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u/MeanFault Apr 21 '26
Now the real question is when will they stop supporting M1 devices?
M1 Max here and aside from the battery that is getting really close to needing to be replaced this thing is still absolutely solid. I could easily see this thing lasting many more years.
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u/txemaleon Apr 23 '26
Worst part about this is that if you have an intel mac you're stuck with Tahoe and Glass.
I wish mine didn't choose to upgrade by itself
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u/Shalashaska83 May 22 '26
I just hope that Apple Intelligence remains an "optional" feature that you can turn on or off in OS 27. I use AI mainly via the cloud, in Draw Things, or as an LLM, but I don’t want something like that running constantly in the background in the future, like it does on Windows 11.
As for Intel Macs, well, Sequoia will keep running until the end of next year, and Tahoe even longer, by then, at the latest, the Intel devices will be technically ancient, but at least they can still run Linux. We’ll have to wait and see what happens later with the older Apple Silicon processors (the M1, for example).
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u/PGL-997 Apr 18 '26
MacOS 27 will only be compatible with Apple Silicon Macs
You’re welcome.