With all the new features that macOS Monterey will be bringing to the table, we’re sure that many Mac owners are excited to upgrade to it once it becomes available. Unfortunately for some Mac owners, you won’t be able to take full advantage of the upgrade because Intel-based Mac computers will not be getting some of the new features.
This is according to Apple’s macOS Monterey Preview page where at the bottom of the page, it mentions some of the features that are only available for the M1 Macs, and presumably future Apple Silicon chipsets. This includes features such as Live Text which allow users to interact with text found in images; the improved city maps for San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London; high-detail globe view for Apple Maps; portrait mode video effect; Natural text-to-speech in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish; and continuous keyboard dictation.
It is assumed that this is because Intel’s processors do not not an equivalent to Apple’s 16-core Neural Engine NPU that is found in the Apple Silicon chipsets, which is why some features won’t be available for Intel computers. It is quite a pity and almost a shame, especially if any of you might have bought a Mac computer right before the M1s were released.
However, we expect that this will continue to be a thing for the foreseeable future until all Intel Macs have been phased out, which could be a while, so if you are looking to buy a Mac, you might want to futureproof yourself.
Filed in . Read more about Intel, M1 and macOS. Source: arstechnica