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by mark_l_watson4 hours ago |
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upvoteby kalleboo4 hours ago|
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I'm curious if there are any decently representative use share stats out there for Mac Intel vs ARM. I tried finding some a while ago and found nothing really conclusive (mostly for niches like developer tools or games - what's the long tail look like?).
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upvoteby notpeter3 hours ago|
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June 2026 Steam Survey says 23% Intel

Homebrew 30d says 27% Intel

My gut says 20-25% is a reasonable ballpark.

Apple generally provides 6-8 years of OS support for hardware. My 6.5 year old 2019 Macbook Pro works fine with macOS 26; macOS 27 will drop support in September 2026; macOS 28 will drop Rosetta Intel support. macOS 26 get updates thru September 2028 at which point all Intel mac hardware will be >8 years old.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/

[2]: https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/homebrew-os-arch-ci/30d/

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upvoteby ejj281 hours ago|
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I would argue that Steam and Homebrew users are relatively niche portions of the userbase, and that they would be more likely to own newer systems.

Neither statistic comes from a sample group that's more representative of the average user, who is mostly browsing the web and using a handful of undemanding applications, and is therefore less motivated to upgrade for performance reasons.

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upvoteby saghm1 hours ago|
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I'm not convinced either of those are substantially more niche than people who need to install the JDK
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upvoteby kstrauser1 hours ago|
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Maybe for Steam, but my gut instinct is that Homebrew would be the opposite: it would be disproportionately popular among devs who pride themselves on keeping hardware for many years longer than most people. "Yeah, this 2015 MBP isn't great for gaming anymore, but it's fine for running vim!" is absolutely the kind of thing I hear frequently.
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upvoteby sh34r1 hours ago|
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I bought an Intel MBP towards the end. No regrets, I had valid reasons.

But the MacOS support at this point is pretty atrocious. I mean, it technically runs, but the OS is clearly designed in a way that ruins performance on this hardware. It’ll run Vim, sure, for 2 hours on battery, hot as hell. At this point, Intel Macs are only fine for running Linux.

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upvoteby bluedino3 hours ago|
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We haven't given out an Intel Mac at work (enterprise with 50k users, maybe 1/5th use Macs) in years....I think we might have a handful of people still using one, but it's gotta be 500:1
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upvoteby running1014 hours ago|
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I still use one
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upvoteby brcmthrowaway4 hours ago|
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Browser communites would have this, no?
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upvoteby flohofwoe4 hours ago|
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Browsers stopped reporting "real" user agents a long time ago as fingerprinting protection.
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upvoteby inigyou4 hours ago|
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Firefox reports correctly.
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upvoteby flohofwoe4 hours ago|
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Not on macOS at least, the Firefox user agent on my uptodate M1 MBP says that I'm on "Intel Mac OS X 10.15".

PS: and on my Win11 machine Firefox says that I'm on 'Windows NT 10.0', which AFAIK is the same NT version that was also reported on Win10.

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upvoteby p03583 hours ago|
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And on Linux it says you're on "X11" even if you're a proud Wayland session user!
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upvoteby kalleboo4 hours ago|
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All the Mac browsers report as Intel even on Apple Silicon to reduce fingerprinting/avoid being detected as PowerPC
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