The deprecation of Intel support is agressive! Every Mac enthusiast I know who uses a Mac as a server uses their old machines, which are pretty much all Intel. We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple!
I know supporting Intel is an ordeal and a choice, but I'm firmly on the camp that Homebrew should find a way to maintain Intel support as long as possible.
> We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple!
If only Apple put a fraction of its resources towards maintaining something like homebrew (or paying the people who do), maybe the situation would be different.
That's impressive, but I'd be reluctant to criticize one open source maintained effort for not having parity with another when it's all volunteer-driven. My point was that Apple is an insanely profitable company with resources that are effectively unlimited compared to what Homebrew has (and presumably likewise when compared to Macports), so the initial framing of "this will stop being supported before Apple" seemed pretty silly to me.
If anything, the overwhelming majority of Apple enthusiasts have gone all-in on Apple Silicon. I sincerely doubt those using old Macs as servers are anything but a rounding error.
Maybe among the general mac population they are a rounding error. But among the mac population who actually peeks behind the curtain and uses homebrew?
If your clients are all macs it is just nicer keeping the server on macos imo. mac os is unix after all so you don't have any software incompatibilities for tools you'd probably run on the server. Time machine support on the server is built in, instead of being a sort of hack with samba if you wanted to try and run it on a linux server. I haven't messed with it much but there might be some clever stuff you could do with applescript and triggered actions, maybe schedule your compute jobs from your calendar app for example.
I held onto a 2010 Mac mini server for like 11 years before retiring it due to hardware problems (blame the hot room). Time Machine is the only thing I can think of that was still relevant at the end, and even that you can do with any NAS supposedly. The macOS Server stuff was way eol, and anything worth keeping had better Linux equivalents.
Yes, to such a stunning degree that I’m having a hard time believing you’re serious. The M1 was utterly transformative. The install base of homebrew is enormous. The proportion who are keeping old Mac hardware around as home servers is minuscule. The proportion of those who are keeping old Intel Macs are a fraction of that, and the ones who aren’t just running Linux on them are yet another fraction.
That’s not to say you’re crazy or anything. You do you. But do understand that you almost certainly constitute a nearly irrelevant minority of users of homebrew.
Intel homebrew is larger than Linuxbrew, yet I think it'd be shocking if they dropped support for Linuxbrew.
Old machines still work. They're still deeply useful. I'm still using daily an Intel Macbook with homebrew on it. When I no longer use it daily in some years more, it'll still make a perfect server.
At this point that would be a 2018 Mac mini, which can only run Sequoia (which will be out-of-support at the same time as Homebrew drops Intel support).
If you want Intel support, MacPorts still runs back to Leopard.
> We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple!
Homebrew will still work (increasingly poorly) on macOS Intel for a year after that, it just won’t be “supported” or tested in CI environments (where currently macOS Intel usually slows down the release of lots of software for all other platforms).
That a volunteer run project with no employees is unable to come anywhere near the support levels of the world’s second biggest, trillion dollar company should not be surprise.
We’re also limited that GitHub (part of Microsoft, 4th biggest, also trillion dollar company) will have killed all macOS Intel CI by autumn/fall 2027 too.
We are announcing this well in advance to give people migration paths to MacPorts or other hardware.
There’s nothing stopping you for doing the work to setup “Intelbrew” and support it for the community. When I started work on Homebrew it had no funding or CI or binary packages/bottles at all. I did much of that work myself. It was hard but you could do the same.
Completely reasonable to say “I don’t have time!” but: then you need to accept the decisions of those that do, sorry.
Yeah they also removed support for --no-quarantine flag :/ I only use it for a few casks nowadays and try to avoid Homebrew as much as possible. For CLI stuff I use Nix, Home-Manager and Nix-Darwin.
People tend to ascribe to Apple only the Jobs years. That Apple might have reset after he came back. The truth is far from that. The people in the company were great, they just needed a massive amount of refocus. Apple has people who have been there decades and have had to reverse incredibly stupid decisions.
VLC has the best UX in the world. Yes It Will Play That Video!
It has a ton of cryptic options, but at least it lets you mess around with them and maybe get something usable, where other apps would just give up and shake their head.
But that’s all I want it to do… play the video. Now it adds those videos to a media library for some reason. I never want this and I never found a way to turn it off.
I moved to IINA to finally get back to a video Swiss Army knife that just plays video and doesn’t force me into an experience I don’t want… after tweaking a bunch of settings.
A miss Perian, the codec pack for QuickTime, which gave QuickTime and QuickLook that play-anything experience. It played the video and got out of my way.
Donald Trump was re-elected because too many voters who voted against him the last two times stayed home. That they don't approve, yet did not go vote, is the textbook definition of fine with it. America does not have a wellspring of anti-Trump voters just waiting to be awakened.
You do not have the right to a phone number without providing ID. If you're an American, those unwritten rights that come from other firm rights written down in laws and constitutions can always be argued, they're always being whittled down.
Rights for everyone are achieved through blood and toil, and if you truly want a right to anonymity and the digital tools necessary to achieve it, you will need blood and toil. Until then, we'll have to squeeze through fast developments that governments have yet to address.
You're just arguing about marketing. Apple has moved to a One device, one OS dichotomy they will not rethink because the foldable iPhone gets a version of the iPad's multitasking. And engineering-wise, when they moved the naming to iPad OS, nothing changed behind the curtain. The iPad still runs the same codebase it did before the marketing switch. They didn't fork anything.
So because their cables were subpar at one point (hint: they were bad because they got rid of insidious chemicals you don't want in your house), that means that's not their MO?
Failure at a mission statement does not mean you have a different mission statement.
> So because their cables were subpar at one point
What do you mean at one point? We bought a laptop for my wife a year ago, cable is almost broken already, behind the connector. They really don't seem to know how to make cables today or before.
> Failure at a mission statement does not mean you have a different mission statement.
Ok? MO or no MO, the cables have useless durability even compared to cheaper cables.
It was literally the first specific announcement they made after they finished their introductions. Not anything iPhone related; they announced that Liquid Glass on macOS would move towards the older design. Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond.
That and the guy who announced it last year fled to Facebook of all places.
>Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond.
Worth remembering too that this isn't merely about "complaints", Apple has significant metrics on the rates at which users are upgrading to a new OS, or not. You can opt-out of sharing that data, but a lot of people (even technical people) may choose to check the box to share with Apple. Anecdotally, I myself and a LOT of other people have stuck with macOS 15 or earlier, but Apple should have a lot of hard data on it and adoption curves vs the past.
A real reaction does certainly suggest that this wasn't just a tempest in a teacup, but that they really weren't seeing the adoption on Macs they expected.
As far as I know, the best data the rest of us have is Google Trends. And based on that, it really does look like Liquid Glass elicited the largest negative reaction that Apple has ever had to an OS release.
"How to Switch to Android" hit 3x its all time peak, "iPhone revert update", hit 4x its all-time peak, "iPhone slow" hit 8x its all time peak, "iPhone bad now" hit 5x its all time peak, "iPhone fix battery" hit 3x its all-time peak (and 14x its five-year peak)
I mostly looked at this for iOS, but searches like "macOS slow", "mac slow", "fix mac battery", "fix mac", etc. all show similar hockey-stick jumps as Liquid Glass rolled out.
If this means a sudden highest-ever 10x shift in customer dissatisfaction - 1000% - then that has to have been significant.
There are probably other parts as well. Dissatisfaction against Apple for App Store has been high, may be for some Liquid Glass was the last straw. Omarchy had the highest number of Apple user switch to Linux. 100,000 downloads may be small numbers by Apple standards but even if half of that were developers coming from Apple Mac I think it is a pretty big shift.
The worst part, intentionally or not they left macOS 26 as the last release for all the Intel user.
> The worst part, intentionally or not they left macOS 26 as the last release for all the Intel user.
I cannot believe that Apple is that insidious to have planned a milquetoast release to be the last one for Intel, but I totally believe that Apple is insidious enough to see how they can benefit from it.
That they're literally marketing macOS 27 as we've listened to your complaints about 26 completely deflates anyone's interest in running macOS 26 on Intel. Their Intel users are being marketed hard to switch to Apple Silicon.
> Omarchy had the highest number of Apple user switch to Linux.
DHH's dotfiles repo is not a viable replacement for macOS, I promise you. Linux is fun, but macOS is already enough of a *nix for most developers, and it works well without much tinkering.
You can easily install bash or any other shell on macOS, and set it as your default with chsh, same as on any other *nix. (Also easy to make the harness use a non-login shell by aliasing it with a $SHELL override.)
I and most of my dev friends didn’t update. The reality is that many of us work in a web browser and an IDE all day writing software for non-Apple platforms. The only incentive I have to update is new and compelling OS features or bugfixes. Since major security patches will likely be backported, that just leaves new features and the reality is that macOS’ only new “feature” worth talking about was Liquid Glass considering their AI offering was also an absolute joke.
Given the other emphasis placed on performance improvements (likely in service to helping to mask the slowness of LLM Siri) I’m really hoping this is a modern Snow Leopard release. I’m looking forward to the Apple nerds digging and offering a compelling narrative about why I should care about updating.
And to add on to that, if this is a bug-fix bonanza release, hopefully we’ll also see a lot of positive movement during the beta period to keep shipping fixes. We’re getting a freaking EQ on AirPods!!!!111!!1! It seems Apple is finally taking some things to heart about listening to their users and I’m 10000% here for it.
The other side of it is forced obsolescence where new OS makes your existing hardware slower. So I wouldn't upgrade my phone beyond iOS18.x purely for performance reasons but if there's a killer feature in a new iPhone I would still consider buying it because its hardware was built to handle the new effects and extra ram it needs.
Yes, anecdotally almost every I know with an older iPhone (14 or older) is not upgrading their iOS. It’s rare for non-technical people to even care about the specifics of a new iOS, but they’ve heard too many stories of slow down and battery usage issues.
It’s a big problem, because running an old iOS is very bad for security. There’s still new vulnerabilities popping up in iOS, especially in the image and video decoders, that are fixed in newer point releases of iOS 26. I’m not sure if Apple is back porting all the fixes. I would definitely be a little afraid, because iMessage previews are a common attack vector and are zero-click. I don’t think anyone really turns off automatic previews; they’re very convenient.
It's still nice to see a company not double down on a fall! They seem to have been on a full year of tech debt and optimisation.
I still would have liked a more genuine walk back (they sold it as "iterations and adjustments" as if the rewinded stuff were new ideas) but overall reassuring.
I know supporting Intel is an ordeal and a choice, but I'm firmly on the camp that Homebrew should find a way to maintain Intel support as long as possible.
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