With what has become a yearly tradition, it’s time to try and predict which Macs will get macOS 14 at WWDC 2023 this year!

Reflection from WWDC 2022 Prediction

With the last prediction, I hadn’t taken into account Apple being much blunter in their discontinuation of hardware. While the majority of my prediction was right, I had mistakenly believed these 2 units would have survived:

  • Late 2013 Mac Pro (Trash Can)
    • MacPro6,1
  • Early 2015 - Mid 2017 MacBook Air (11” and 13”)
    • MacBookAir7,1 and MacBookAir7,2

My reasoning for why the Trash Can would get an extra year of mainline OS support was the following:

So why did Apple drop support? CPU Limitation.

For the MacBook Air, this was my reasoning:

Following Monterey’s cadence for hardware drop-off, 2019 seemed right on the edge of last sold. The Air got right under it and thus was chopped.

So what we can learn from this:

  • Pay attention to hardware limitations, Apple will kill hardware even if it’s too soon
  • Last sold date isn’t always a reliable indicator of whether a machine survives

macOS 14 Predictions

Hardware Deaths

For a quick recap from the 2022 post, here’s what every OS release for the past 5 releases gave us:

  • WWDC 2018 - macOS Mojave:
    • Newest sold being discontinued: Macmini5,x - Late 2012
  • WWDC 2019 - macOS Catalina:
    • Newest sold being discontinued: MacPro5,1 - Late 2013
  • WWDC 2020 - macOS Big Sur:
    • Newest sold being discontinued: MacBookPro9,2 - Late 2016
  • WWDC 2021 - macOS Monterey:
    • Newest sold being discontinued: MacBook8,1 - Mid-2017
  • WWDC 2022 - macOS Ventura:
    • Newest sold being discontinued: MacPro6,1 - Late 2019

From this, we see Ventura actually killed 2 years’ worth of hardware. However, that is from 2 outliers (MacPro6,1 and MacBookAir7,x). Otherwise, it looks to be only a single-year cadence as before, but clearly, Apple will stretch a few models to 2 years. Now when we break that down per model, we get the following for dropped Macs:

  • Note: Assuming Apple’s base cut-off is 2019, due to macOS Ventura’s approximate 2018 + extras
Model Year Released Year Discontinued
MacBook10,1 Mid 2017 Mid 2019
MacBookAir8,1 Late 2018 Mid 2019
MacBookAir8,2 Mid 2019 Mid 2020
MacBookPro14,1 Mid 2017 Mid 2019
MacBookPro14,2/3 Mid 2017 Mid 2018
MacBookPro15,1/3 Mid 2018 Late 2019
MacBookPro15,2 Mid 2018 Mid 2020
MacBookPro15,4 Late 2019 Mid 2020

The one model family I’m unsure of is iMac18,x. The reason is as follows:

  • iMac18,x was released in 2017, however iMac18,1 was sold on Apple’s site until late 2021!
    • iMac18,2/3 were discontinued in early 2019

So for Apple to kill iMac18,2/3 but not iMac18,1 would make little sense.

Otherwise, the 2 machines that I believe are a stretch for drop off:

  • MacBookAir8,2
  • MacBookPro15,x

As these are both “discontinued in 2020” units, they could legitimately survive. With the MacBook Pro family, this would mean the entire 2018+ line survives due to Apple preferring to kill entire families at once instead of odd-ball middle units (see iMac18,1 discussion above, and MacBookPro9,2 in Big Sur).

Remaining Hardware

Now let’s see what few Intel models we have left:

Model Year Released Year Discontinued
MacBookAir9,1 Early 2020 Late 2020
MacBookPro16,x Late 2019 Late 2021
iMac18,1 Mid 2017 Late 2021
iMac18,2/3 Mid 2017 Early 2019
iMac19,1 Early 2019 Mid 2020
iMac19,2 Early 2019 Early 2021
iMac20,x Mid 2020 Early 2022
iMacPro1,1 Late 2017 Early 2021
MacPro7,1 Late 2019 N/A
Macmini8,1 Mid 2018 Early 2023

Potential Ramifications for OpenCore Legacy Patcher

For those unfamiliar, my colleagues and I maintain the OpenCore Legacy Patcher project which aims to restore support for legacy Macs on newer versions of macOS. With the above discussed, here are my predictions for what we’ll see (or wouldn’t see) in macOS 14 backend-wise that can affect us:

  • Positives:
    • IO80211FamilyLegacy-based Wireless Cards should remain supported
      • Due to iMac18,x remaining
      • Includes cards such as the BCM94350 and BCM94360
    • Intel Kaby Lake iGPU drivers should remain supported
      • Due to iMac18,x remaining
      • Relatively easy patching for models such as MacBookPro14,1
  • Negatives:
    • USB 2.0 (EHCI) drivers could potentially be removed
      • No Mac in Ventura ships with dedicated EHCI controllers (the last being MacBookAir7,x)
    • Rosetta could potentially be upgraded to support AVX2.0
      • Would kill all pre-Haswell Macs, as Apple would have no reason to maintain x86_64 (non-h) dyld shared caches
    • Apple could start shipping x86_64h kernel and kernel extensions
      • Even more troubles for pre-Haswell Macs

Rosetta and the kernel space were problems we expected to face in macOS Ventura, however we thankfully never got that. And since Apple moves in a tick-tock cadence for major OS changes (see Catalina and Monterey), we might get lucky this year and have an easier time (fingers crossed)

Conclusion

Assuming my predictions are correct, we’re likely to see Apple kill off the entire MacBook family as well as all Butterfly-equipped Macs. As with macOS Ventura, I don’t expect customers to be prepared for their model to no longer get new major OS updates.

Regarding my thought process this year, I wanted to go in a bit more pessimistic route rather than have users hope for their unit to survive. I had a few 2017 MacBook Air users excited after my 2022 prediction but instead were sorely disappointed. What I hope to happen this June is to see more machines survive than I predicted, but this could also be me trying to mentally prepare myself when we have 10 more Mac models to support in OpenCore Legacy Patcher ;p