Ask HN: Anyone still do work on Intel Macs?

8 points by senor_digimon 4 hours ago | 8 comments

I might need to hop on a 2018 mac for some dev work, so just curious what those still on it think about it. Are there major roadblocks, or you mostly fine once you get your code editor/remote ssh?

mediumsmart 13 minutes ago |

Still on intel Monterey 2015 mbp and emacs 30 something. Switched to macports in 2024 and no complaints.

neverartful 2 hours ago |

I still very actively use a Mac Pro 2013 (aka trashcan). It has 64 GB RAM, an 8 core Xeon cpu, and 1TB NVMe. I'm running macOS Monterey (12.7.6) on it. The hardware is still plenty powerful enough to be very useful. Supported software is getting to be more troublesome as the days go by. When the pain gets too great I'll look into installing Linux on it with the goal of continuing to use it.

JamesSwift 2 hours ago |

Intel is very very close to dead now as apple has officially EOLed them and software communities are following suit (eg homebrew and nix). I just picked up an apple silicon because the writing was on the wall that it could be any day that I could no longer get “real work done” on the intel machine

the-mitr 1 hour ago |

I have a macbook air from 2017. I use it when I travel, major work being done on a m4 mac mini. The issue is end of support for brew and many of the new/ latest apps not working but otherwise for simple things is works well

somewhatrandom9 1 hour ago |

I've heard it rumored (maybe on this site??) that it's wise to avoid upgrading to Tahoe, on intel macs, but I don't have any evidence to back this up.

anigbrowl 4 hours ago |

I have 2 (an i7 MBP and an i9 iMac)and rarely think about it, except when I want to try some local AI idea or do something intensively GPU related. Unless you want to do something like videotranscoding or high-res, high frame rate gaming/simulation/eye candy, they work great.

nh43215rgb 1 hour ago |

why not? its more like a retro machine nowadays but still a good one. but then i should admit that most power-hungry workloads have now been offloaded to newer machines, alas..

orionblastar 4 hours ago |

I still have my iMac G3 Bondi Blue in my basement. I had an Intel MacBook but sold it because it only ran up to MacOS 10.7. It worked fine about 10 years ago. Now I doubt it will.