So No, Ma

Last week was the annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), where Apple shows off what new things it’ll be bringing out in the coming months. As is my habit, I skipped past all the live-blogged posts and waited for folks who were there to digest and summarise what had been announced.

As I no longer have an iPad, and am not currently looking to buy any more iDevices, my only real interest was in what was coming to macOS and iOS. The most pertinent news for me was that my 2017 iMac won’t make the cut for macOS 14 Sonoma, due out in the autumn.

In a way, I’d been expecting this, as the machine is approaching the point where Apple traditionally winds down support anyway. The migration to Apple Silicon, and changes that rely on the M-Series chips, have no doubt had an impact too.

So what happens now? Well, Apple will support my current macOS (Ventura) for a couple more years, thought that support will be mostly security fixes. After that, the flow of updates from them will stop, and the future of this machine rests on the health of the hardware and the willingness of third-party developers to support it.

Right now, the only thing that concerns me is the external SSD that I’m running Ventura from — according to DriveDX it’s showing signs of nearing the end of its working life, so I’ll need to install a fresh copy of Ventura onto a newer SSD and restore my setup to that from Time Machine in the near future. Otherwise, touch wood, I’m good.

In a year or so I will hopefully have the money to buy a new machine to take over from this one as my workhorse, at which point I may well wipe it, install Linux Mint and use that for as long as the hardware will hold out.

The other news from WWDC that piqued my interest was the 15-inch MacBook Air — that sounds like it would be a good replacement, albeit a pricy one for my budget. Having a portable system would be a nice change, the last (and only) laptop I owner was a Dell Inspiron 500m back in the mid-2000s. I could probably get used to the smaller screen size compared to the iMac. Otherwise, the 24-inch iMac would be a contender if Apple updates the line to support more memory and bigger internal storage.