@Technogeezer wrote:While I agree that at some point in time Apple will stop supporting Intel Macs, I don't think that's particularly likely in the near term. After all they still are selling Intel Macs (the Mac Pro), and they just stopped shipping Intel iMacs. My tea leaves say that you'll see about another 2-3 years of new macOS releases supporting Intel models, with another 2 years of support after that, but that's just speculation based on what I've seen in the past.
The PowerPC to Intel transition saw new macOS versions dropping support for some models as little as three years after they were discontinued (Snow Leopard vs the 2005 PowerMac G5). We're two versions into macOS with Apple Silicon support and no evidence yet of a cutoff as short as 3 years.
If Apple sticks to their pattern over the last few years, then most Macs should be able to run the latest macOS version for at least 5 years after the model was discontinued, with some getting 6 to 7 years, and a minimum of 4 years in rare cases. The only recent example which got less than 5 years was the Mid 2012 non-retina 13-inch MacBook Pro which Apple kept selling until late 2016 (well after its contemporaries) and was dropped by Big Sur in late 2020.
(Add two more years for security updates.)
If the recent pattern continues, then the 2019 Mac Pro needs to be supported by at least the next four and probably five macOS versions, depending on when it is discontinued. It would be rather odd maintaining support for just one low volume Intel model, so it seems more likely they would eventually settle on a multi-model minimum such as "Intel models must have a T2 chip" (late 2017 iMac Pro, all 2018-2020 models except 2019 iMacs) until all Intel support is dropped.
Next data point (models supported by macOS 13) is less than a month away.
