Because it costs them money to maintain it, and they'll make more money when people upgrade to M series?
replyIn all seriousness, it's a little lame. Consider that the Intel Mac Pro (2019 model) was still selling in 2023! That's not that long ago, and those were their highest end machines in terms of memory capacity. The "new" Mac Pro has since been discontinued...
Though buying a Mac Pro in 2023 would be a bit weird. The writing was on the wall. By that point the M1 was almost out for three years and even the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra had been out for a year.
reply(IMO it stopped making sense buying an Intel Mac after the M1 Air or if your want to be generous the M1 Pro/Max-based MacBook Pros.)
But if you wanted to buy an OSX machine with up to 1.5TB of memory, you only had a brief window between when the new Mac Pro was announced and the old Mac Pro was discontinued to snag one before that option went away forever. The M-series Mac Pro only ever supported 192GB.
replyI agree, it is weird, but there were certain workloads (like those needing large memory) that wouldn't run anywhere else. Remember that M1 Ultra, at that time, was limited to 128G of RAM. M2 Ultra brought it to 192G. Intel Mac Pros could take 1.5 TB.
replyBut it does?
reply> Rosetta 2 requires almost the entire OS to have Intel support.
The implication here being that (almost) the entire OS having Intel support is not trivial.
Because Apple is the King of Deprecations. And they get away with it.
reply> Because Apple is the King of Deprecations.
replyGoogle might wear that particular crown: https://killedbygoogle.com
Apple is the King of Hardware Deprecations. Google is the King of Software Deprecations. You're both right.
replyThey are the Kings of Apple Ecosystem Deprecations - not just hardware. I'm comparing them to the x86 and the Windows ecosystem.
replyGoogle is the God-King of Killing software.