this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Intel macs about to go for cheap (hopefully) and will be great for putting Linux on.
But why would you? Those Intel Macs were terrible. If you're thinking "cheap Linux box," IMO the best way to do that is get a used PC from a corporation that is unloading them during an upgrade (like a Dell or HP workstation), like an i5 with 8GB RAM (or 16 if you're lucky), they pull the hard drive for security (and it's almost always an HDD), you drop a SATA SSD in it, put Linux on it, and you have a pretty good computer, even (and maybe especially) if you run a headless server and remote into it with your daily driver computer (what you surf the web on, which could even be an Android phone or maybe an iPhone, not sure about that).
FR, I had a £4k top spec one, Intel i9, 64GB as my work laptop... And even back then, I wouldn't have bought it myself for £800 if given the chance. Absolutely atrocious, particularly in terms of thermal design. I remember one summer, having Intel vTune installed and seeing the CPU laptop throttle to 0.25 GHz with Zoom open, because it would wake up the power hungry GPU and the laptop couldn't deal with a British 30°C summer.
The Apple Silicon ones are lovely in comparison. When I swapped it, I remember going through a whole flight using my laptop without charging thinking "what sorcery is this".
Shame there isn't a decent equivalent ARM laptop that can do Linux.
What's the point then? Those ancient intel chips are just slow and overheating and getting their ass kicked by anything by AMD from the last 5 years.
People don’t always need fastest possible computers for their tasks. As long as the browser works and is current is enough for most people.
Besides, Macs tend to be nice looking and their build quality is good. Aesthetics are subjective, but many find even older Macs pretty nice to look at compared to black boxes.
Not arguing with that, I am myself daily-driving a lenovo that was assembled 3 years before the last intel macbook was produced, so it's not exactly new either.
This helps explain why anyone would want to buy an obsolete, irreparable, non-extensible laptop 6 years after its discontinuation. I don't think it's good advise, though :-)
Other way round I believe rosetta was to run x86 compiled apps on arm chips. So they are just pulling up the bridge to avoid a situation where developers feel like just making an intel/amd binary that will work on both platforms
Right, but Apple is doing this because most users have switched to ARM at this point and they will be ending software support for x86. So it seems safe to presume Intel macs will become cheap.