If you own an Intel Mac, you have 12 months to upgrade to a new model

Apple on Monday unveiled the latest version of macOS and in the process cut a bunch of Intel Macs from the compatibility list. But if you have one of the lucky models that made it through, there’s bad news on the horizon—Apple has announced that macOS 26 Tahoe will be the final version that supports any Intel Macs.

As it stands, just a handful of Intel Macs support macOS Tahoe:

• The 16-inch MacBook Pro from 2019
• The 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2020 with four Thunderbolt ports 
• The 27-inch iMac from 2020
• The Mac Pro from 2019

That’s somewhat surprising, since macOS Sequoia retained support for a surprising number of Intel Macs. Tahoe drops support for a variety of Mac models, including:

• MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2020)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)
• MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2019, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)
• MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2019, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports)
• iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019)
• iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2019)
• iMac Pro (2017)
• Mac mini (2018)

The Macs above will still get security updates for two years, so they’re not exactly obsolete, but less than five years of OS updates in this case of the MacBook Air is somewhat out of character for Apple. So it’s clear that Apple wants to quickly move away from designing new OSes for two sets of processors.

When explaining the move to the Liquid Glass interface, Apple said that the Apple Silicon had enabled “software materials and experiences we once could only dream of.” And sadly, those dreams don’t include Intel chips.