The last macOS to support Intel based Macs, macOS 26 Tahoe, is already out, and Apple has committed to two more years of security and Safari updates for the remaining Intel eligible models.
The coda of the Intel Mac era is now visible. macOS 26 Tahoe, the final macOS release to support Intel-based Macs, is already out, and Ars Technica reports Apple has committed to two more years of security and Safari updates for the remaining Intel-eligible models. After roughly two decades, the platform transition Apple telegraphed in 2005 is no longer imminent; it is finished in everything but name.
That long goodbye traces an arc worth more than nostalgia. Apple came to Intel in 2005 for the same reason it eventually left: performance-per-watt, the measure of how much work a chip can do for each watt of heat it generates. The retrospective frames the partnership as one that made Macs dramatically better, then dramatically worse, before Apple concluded that the only way out was to design the silicon itself.
The exit had been visible for years. Intel's "Tick-Tock" model of shrinking transistors one generation and redesigning the architecture the next began to falter at 14 nanometers, and 10-nanometer production did not ship in volume until late 2019. Years of Skylake refreshes followed. François Piednoël, a former Intel engineer, told PC Gamer in 2016 that Apple had become Intel's top bug-filer for the Skylake generation, a sign, he said, that the company was no longer leading the platform its customers depended on.
The exit also had a longer fuse. Apple had been laying its own silicon groundwork since acquiring chip designer P.A. Semi in 2008 and shipping the A4 in the iPhone 4 in 2010, then the A5 in the iPad 2 in 2011. The 2016 MacBook Pros introduced the T1, a bridge chip for the Touch Bar and Touch ID that Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham argues was effectively the first Apple Silicon Mac. The full break came in November 2020 with the M1, and Apple reused the same playbook it had run in 2005: a Rosetta compatibility layer, universal binaries, and external designs nearly identical to the Intel models they replaced. The retrospective on 20 years of Intel Macs walks through both transitions in detail.
The entry, in 2005, had been driven by Intel's strengths. PowerPC had failed to deliver the promised 3 GHz G5, and the G5 had never fit a laptop. Tim Cook, then Apple's chief operating officer, called a G5 laptop "the mother of all thermal challenges" in a 2005 Macworld interview. IBM, the source of PowerPC chips, was reluctant to invest heavily in the low-volume Mac market, where Apple shipped roughly 3 million machines a year. Steve Jobs publicly confirmed at WWDC 2005 that Apple had been building universal PowerPC-and-Intel builds "just in case," and Apple shipped a Developer Transition Kit, a Pentium 4 in a Power Mac G5 case, to developers for $999 plus a $499-per-year developer account before reclaiming the machines in 2006.
The first retail Intel Macs, the iMac and MacBook Pro, arrived in January 2006, and the Mac Pro and Xserve finished the switch in August 2006, ahead of Jobs's end-of-2007 prediction. The 2008 MacBook Air used a custom Core 2 Duo with 60 percent smaller packaging, helping define the ultrabook category that Intel later chased with a $300 million Ultrabook initiative. The partnership's high water mark arrived just as the underlying engineering began to slip.
The arc matters because another platform shift is already underway. Apple Silicon is maturing, and the wider PC industry is following the same ARM-based architecture that Apple's M-series chips use, partly because the performance-per-watt trade-off that once favored Intel now favors designs closer to what Apple ships. The Intel Mac era is a case study in how an architectural advantage can flip, and how a customer can become the leading indicator of the flip.
For readers still running an Intel Mac, the practical notes are concrete. macOS 26 Tahoe is the last macOS with Intel support, and macOS 27, due this fall, will be Intel-free. After Tahoe, Ars Technica reports Apple has committed to two more years of security and Safari updates for the remaining Intel-eligible models, a window that ends around fall 2028. The future of Rosetta, Apple's compatibility layer for running older Mac software on Apple Silicon, is undefined; Ars Technica reports Apple has not announced when it will be retired. The coda is short, and the timer is already running.