Deprecation and removal of macOS Intel builds in Blender 5.0

Hello everyone,

After evaluating the maintenance costs of macOS Intel builds, the rendering and platform maintenance teams has reached the conclusion that it is no longer practical to continue supporting them. There are too many driver specific issues which take a lot of time for investigation and trying to figure out work-arounds. It often comes at a price that we are unable to implement speed or quality or functional improvements.

Blender 4.5 will be the last one to ship with the official macOS Intel support.
Due to the state of the drivers we’ll do our best to keep it running on macOS 13+. Previous OS versions have issues that we were unable to work around from our side. We will not be focusing on macOS prior to 13.

Note that Blender 4.5 is LTS which will be supported for 2 years. We are open for patches that improve macOS Intel support throughout the LTS lifespan.

Blender 5.0 will NOT be shipping with the official macOS Intel support.
People will be able to compile Blender 5 and onwards on macOS Intel, but they’ll also need to compile the dependencies. It is similar to other platforms that we do not support officially. We are open for non-intrusive patches that improve support of such platforms as well.

We do understand there are people who are still on macOS Intel, but it is only that far we can push Blender when the platform is not supported by its vendor. Surely there are macOS updates, but they do not include crucial fixes we need from the drivers.

13 Likes

Thanks for the update and relatively long lead time.

In the past I feel like the deprecation of specific hardware wasn’t well communicated to the end user. So here’s a few suggestions to help improve the communicate for this deprecation. As always these are just suggestions.

  • Put the deprecation notice in as many (reasonable) places as possible.
    • Devtalk (Already done)
    • 4.5 Release notes? (Just note that this will be the last release that officially supports it)
      • And put it in a semi-prominent place in the fancy release notes with 4.5. Once again explaining it will be the last release to support it.
    • 5.0 Release notes (Obviously)
    • Compatibility release notes Compatibility - Blender Developer Documentation
    • Maybe put a notice in 4.5 when a user opens a Intel binary for the first time (detected by whether or not the 4.5 preferences exist). The notice could be a menu the user needs to “confirm they have read” before they can set up Blender, and the notice could inform them that 4.5 is the last release to support Intel Macs.
    • The Blender requirements page

A note about the Blender requirements page.
If Intel/AMD GPU based Macs already have issues with macOS 13 and lower (E.g. 124137 ), then maybe the Blender requirements page should be updated now to denote that only macOS 14 and above are supported for Intel/AMD GPU Macs (Or just “Non Apple Silicon Macs”)


This is probably one of the more important places to put it. I know quite a few people missed the Intel/AMD Cycles Metal GPU support removal in Blender 4.3 because the change was just bundled in with the “But wait, there’s more” section at the bottom of the release notes page.

6 Likes

Totally agree.

Indeed we have a road ahead of us to make it clear and predictable. We will need to take care of the release notes, compatibility changes, maybe even something on the requirement page.

We’d also need to see at the exact wording in the messaging, ideally make it clear what are the known limitations. It’ll make it more clear for artists to set expectations, and will also make it more explicit for the community where the help is needed.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on it, appreciate it!

3 Likes