As the Intel Mac era has wound down over the last couple of years, we've been painstakingly tracking the amount of software support that each outgoing model is getting. We did this to establish, with over 20 years' worth of hard data, whether Intel Mac owners were getting short shrift as Apple shifted its focus to Apple Silicon hardware and to software that leveraged Apple Silicon-exclusive capabilities.
So far, we've found that owners of Intel Macs made in the mid-to-late 2010s are definitely getting fewer major macOS updates and fewer years' worth of security updates than owners of Intel Macs made in the late 2000s and early 2010s but that these systems are still getting more generous support than old PowerPC Macs did after Apple switched to Intel's processors.
The good news with the macOS 15 Sequoia release is that Apple is dropping very few Intel Mac models this year, a much-needed pause that slows the steady acceleration of support-dropping we've seen over the last few macOS releases.
The bad news is that isn't true for the MacBook Air, generally the most important and bestselling of all Apple's Mac models—the 2018 version of the Air (and a very lightly revised 2019-era variant of the same machine) are being dropped from the Sequoia support list, giving them by far the shortest support window of any MacBook Air since the very first one back in 2008.
And the uncertainty of being an Intel Mac owner in the Apple Silicon era persists, as we don't know exactly when Apple plans to fully remove Intel support from macOS. Statistically, it could go either way—at least a few Intel Macs could have one more update coming, but Sequoia could also be the end of the line.
The data
If you haven't read our pieces about Intel Mac support in macOS 13 Ventura or macOS 14 Sonoma, here's a quick overview of what data we're collecting and what it means. You can also view the raw data in a spreadsheet here; the notes at the end of our macOS Ventura support article have some details on data collection.