Given Apple's track record of supporting older Mac hardware, I would expect Intel Mac hardware to be supported for many years and many OS versions after the last Intel Mac has been produced.

Also given Apple's recent MacBook track record, the first version of ARM Macs may not be as much of a slam dunk as people hope.

Which track record are you talking about? Apple discontinued OS support for PPC only 3 years after intel was announced. That means no more support for xcode and new commandline tools after 3.5 years.

I just got a 16" MBP... Still, the waiting game sucks too. Apple said their first Arm mac will come out at the end of the year, but that could well be a very low end Mac mini, or Macbook Air. It's unknown when the pro line will come out.

There was an article posted here on HN yesterday speculating that the first ARM Mac will be a new 13” MacBook Pro.

That might explain why all but the top line version of the barely-refreshed 13+ MacBook Pro are missing Intel's 10th-gen processors.

Sandbag the upgrade for the 13" so it's not that desirable and you won't cannibalize your own demand for the release of the first Apple Silicon machine

If that's the case, Apple is deliberately hindering their intel version so that the future ARM version destroys it in benchmarks.

They'll win anyway. But comparing a 2021-ish Apple ARM laptop against intel's early 2019 chip isn't particularly fair.

People will see the benchmark as a blow to intel (and it is), but the fair benchmarks would be a 2021 ARM mac against the best intel has to offer

My personal philosophy is to buy the third gen of every new type of product. The second gen tends to fix al big issues in the first. The third irons out all the small issues left. After that there probably won't be many changes except for some performance bumps.

I think we’ve got some time. I’m on the last leg of a 2012 too. Just like the sibling comment said, since we don’t know if the pro line will get a refresh there could possibly be a longer runway.