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Enlarge / The 2016 MacBook Pro is one of the Macs that's being left behind by macOS Ventura. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple unveiled Ventura, the next major version of macOS, at its Worldwide Developers Conference this afternoon. Like most macOS releases, its changes are mostly incremental, but it does include a new multitasking UI called Stage Manager, new Continuity features to help your Mac mesh with your iPhone and iPad, and several redesigned and updated apps.

The bad news is that Ventura drops support for a wide range of Intel Macs. The full compatibility list is below:

• 2017 iMac/iMac Pro and later
• 2018 MacBook Air and later
• 2017 MacBook Pro and later
• 2019 Mac Pro and later
• 2018 Mac mini and later
• 2017 MacBook and later
• 2022 Mac Studio and later

Compared to the compatibility list for Monterey, Apple has dumped all Macs released before 2017, including the 2013 Mac Pro (which it sold until December 2019) and the 2016 MacBook Pro models that introduced the Touch Bar. If your Mac is using an Apple T2 or Apple Silicon chip, you're safe. If you're using an older Intel Mac, it's clear that Apple is aggressively dropping support for those systems.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

iOS 16 drops support for a few generations of older iPhones, including most hardware that used Apple’s A9 or A10 chips. Usually, iPadOS follows suit when iOS drops older hardware, but it looks like iPadOS 16 will be more forgiving of iPads running older chips.

According to Apple's press release, iPadOS 16 will run on the following models:

• Fifth-generation iPad and newer (that's the one from 2017, the first $329 iPad).
• iPad Air (3rd generation) and newer.
• iPad mini (5th generation) and newer.
• All iPad Pro models.

That means that 2014's iPad Air 2 (which Apple sold for years as a lower-cost model, before the $329 iPad came along) and 2015's iPad mini 4 won't support the new OS but that most other models that can upgrade to iPadOS 15 will also be able to run iPadOS 16. Apple may continue to provide iOS and iPadOS 15 security updates for devices that can't upgrade to iPadOS 16, but we'll need to wait for confirmation before we know that for sure.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

One of the selling points of iPhones and iPads is that you'll get several years of prompt software updates, released at the same time to all devices regardless of your specific model or cellular carrier. Today Apple announced iOS and iPadOS 16, and with those new versions comes a new set of minimum hardware requirements.

Apple's press release and preview page say that the OS will support "iPhone 8 and later." That means that the new update won't be compatible with phones using Apple A9 or A10 chips, including the iPhone 6S, 6S Plus, 7, 7 Plus, the first-gen iPhone SE, and the seventh-generation iPod Touch.

Here's the official list of compatible devices:

Enlarge / MetalFX Upscaling, as visually described by Apple at WWDC 2022. (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—At this year's WWDC, Apple announced a surprising new system coming to its Metal 3 gaming API that may sound familiar to PC gamers: MetalFX Upscaling.

The system will leverage Apple's custom silicon to reconstruct video game graphics using lower-resolution source images so that games can run more efficiently at lower resolutions while looking higher-res. This "temporal reconstruction" system sounds similar to existing offerings from AMD (FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0) and Nvidia (Deep Learning Super-Sampling), along with an upcoming "XeSS" system from Intel. Based on how the system is described, it will more closely resemble AMD's system, since M1 and M2 silicon do not include dedicated AI processing cores like Nvidia's RTX series of graphics cards.

By announcing this functionality for some of the world's most popular processors, Apple is arguably letting more game developers build their games and engines with image reconstruction—even if MetalFX Upscaling isn't open source, unlike AMD's FSR 2.0 system. Still, these image reconstruction systems typically have temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) in common. So long as game devs keep that kind of anti-aliasing in mind with their games and engines, they'll be more likely to take advantage and thus run more efficiently on a wide range of consoles, computers, and smartphones.