Apple Says All Mac Minis With Intel Are Now Vintage

Apple has officially designated all Intel-based Mac minis as "vintage" or "obsolete," marking the end of an era. This means Apple no longer guarantees parts or service for these devices, as they've surpassed the 5- to 7-year support window. 9to5Mac reports: Apple periodically adds devices to its ever-growing list of vintage and obsolete products. That happened today, as spotted by MacRumors, with two noteworthy "vintage" additions: iPhone 6s and Mac mini (2018). The latter product is especially significant, because the 2018 Mac mini was the last remaining Intel model that was not yet labeled either vintage or obsolete.

So what are those timelines exactly? Per Apple's definitions: Vintage: "Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago." Obsolete: "Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 7 years ago." [...] Since these products are now considered vintage, Apple no longer guarantees that parts for repairs will be readily available.

Mine was already vintage.

[xfade551]

A year or so ago, I bought a 2012 model to serve as a home fileserver and media center. Given it just sits idling most of the time, I'm not too worried about it being obsolete. I have other computers for gaming or other heavy processing.

Re:

[SlashbotAgent]

it just sits idling

With fan and disk spinning, capacitors losing capacitance, rubber feet gluing to the shelf...

Re: Mine was already vintage.

[xfade551]

The spinning disks are only in the external RAID enclosure. I'll worry about the caps going bad if and when it happens (I have Macs that are even older that still run fine), and I shift the Mini around every so often and the shelf is glass so I'm not worried about rubber feet getting sticky.

Re:

[crow]

It might pay to upgrade, though likely not in this case. It would be worth measuring the actual power draw, multiply Watts times 24*365.25 / 1000 * (cost per KwH from your power bill).

Let's do the math:

I see someone reported a 2012 Mac Mini drawing 9.1W, and power at $.16/KwH (national average), that comes out to only $12.76/year. So you're not likely to be able to save enough to pay for an upgrade. But if you were in Massachusetts at $.28/KwH with a home-built server drawing 65W, that's about $160/year,

Re:

[shanen]

Which OS are you running on it? I'm thinking of converting mine to Linux, but wanted to make sure I got the last of my files off of it first... Funny that the migration utility doesn't support escape from Apple World, eh? Or maybe someone around knows the secret?

(I have booted it to Ubuntu from USB, but couldn't figure out the trick for a dual boot and at this point would just prefer to format the universe and start over. Don't really care about preserving any Apple software, though kind of curious why I co

Re:

[king*jojo]

It powers on??? Call the Vatican!
I worked at place that got five* of the gen 2 'pizza box' deals, and within three years, four of them were in the dumpster, which I guess is the only fix for when they suddenly cease powering on ("what do you expect for a budget model?" I was told on ars or some other mac forum)

*for the record, I was against this purchase, as I had already been around the block with the gen 1s which were fitted with ipod hard drives that lasted about 16 months like most ipod HDs. But at lea

Re:

[Mspangler]

Same with my 2014. It's been upgraded with an SSD and has an external HD as well. Runs the current version of Linux Mint Cinnamon just fine.

I was looking for a 2018 for the stereo cabinet, but the prices refuse to go down, probably because they can run Linux. Can the 2018 Minis run Windows 11.

Typing from

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

a 16 year old Optiplex. Works "fine" for me with Debian.

Re:

[viperidaenz]

And just like the 2018 Mac Mini, Dell might refuse to repair it if they don't have any more parts for it.

Re: Typing from

[drinkypoo]

Unlike the 2018 Mac mini you can just swap the storage device into a vaguely similar machine, boot and run.

Many apps are already ARM only

[xack]

As the pool of old macs to test intel code on is shrinking, many developers are going ARM only on their apps. I remember that by around 2010 that PowerPC was mostly dropped by the majority of apps.

Re: Many apps are already ARM only

[DodgyGeezer]

Apple Silicon devices can run x86_64 binaries via Rosetta 2. Are real Intel devices really required for testing the binaries of most apps? We have so many Intel Mac Minis that this isnâ(TM)t a problem for us. Testing on the latest macOS is a different issue. Testing on Apple Silicon doesnâ(TM)t have as many devices for us either.

Re:

[dfghjk]

"Are real Intel devices really required for testing the binaries of most apps? "

Yes

"Testing on the latest macOS is a different issue."

Are real latest macOS releases really required testing the binaries of most apps?

Re:

[bkmoore]

Five years after a major architecture change sounds about right, given Apple's history. M68k was supported up to about 1998-1999. PPC software updates ended around 2010. So 2025 would make sense as the last year of Intel- Mac support.

refurbs don't count

[v1]

just an FYI, Apple goes by the date of sale when determining warranty category for parts availability. So if you bought a refurb of a late model, it may still technically not be "vintage" yet.

My laptop, the VERY last intel model sold, I got as a great deal on a fully loaded refurb (4tb ssd etc) and it JUST went out of 3 yr applecare less than two months ago. It's out of warranty, but Apple won't consider it "vintage" for another two years.

Of course this article is concerning regular new sale date ranges, which don't apply to mine, which is a small hole in a large wall.

Qnap 656

[Kekke]

Still going strong with 6 disks (6 and some TeraBytes of RAID6) 3 disks I have replaced during 13-14 years of 24/7 operation. (not very heavily loaded, but still.) Not My backup, but I've been wondering will this things psu / chipset ever gona give up.... BTW: qnap still offering regular fixes for vulns... APPLE: eat sh&/

Re:

[registrations_suck]

I'm still driving my 2007 Jeep Wrangler too.

Has about as much to do with the story as your qnap, whatever the fuck that is.

My "vintage" macbook pro still kicks ass

[EmperorOfCanada]

I have to use some windows software. There are many fields where windows is not optional. Engineering is most certainly one of them. Thus, I need to run windows in a VM on a mac, if I am going to use a mac. The arm versions of windows are aspirational, not functional. I would argue wine on intel linux is far more "real". While I appreciated the performance of my silicon and its battery life, the reality is that my "vintage" intel mac of no particular power, is very good, it performs well, and it has an acc

Thank goodness for OpenCore Legacy Patcher

[davidwr]

Lets you run the current macOS on long-obsolete intel Macs. It also runs on Arm.

There are some limitations for very old equipment, but middle-aged stuff runs with similar performance as it did with its "final" officially-supported version of macOS.

Re:

[Mspangler]

OCLP may come to an abrupt end this fall, and if not then next year. There won't be an Intel version of the OS.

The Minis were cut off sooner than I expected. The higher end Intel minis were sold until the end of 2022. It's usually 5 years after they stop selling them. I suspect the minis got cut early due to the HD 630 graphics are not up to the new GUI Apple is promising for the fall. But then there should be a few laptops also off the supported list.

How soon?

[commodore73]

How soon will all of Intel be vintage? Intel CPUs are already not even an option for me to consider.

Re:

[Mspangler]

Intel Mac Pro, released 2019, sold until mid 2023, so call it 2022 bases on OS release plus 5 or 2027.

But what they just did with the 2018 mini was 2022 plus 3, and it's dead. So I'd bet the Intel Pro goes down next year.

Apple abuses the Mac pro users badly. The very expensive G5 Pros were left on MacOS 10.5. The 2012 Mac Pro was sold with a standard video card that Apple couldn't be bothered to write a Metal driver for, so running Mohave required a new video card, but that only worked for another year.

The