First covered yesterday by Marko Zivkovic of AppleInsider.com, it appears as though some Intel Macs will be dropped from the list of supported models while the absolute latest generation of intel Macs will continue onto this new update. The report cites “anonymous people familiar with the matter.”

This topic was also covered on 9to5Mac just this morning as well, citing the report from AppleInsider.

The 9to5Mac article also mentions the changes in the naming schemes this year across the board to all Apple OSes. Looks like Apple’s going more in line with how “car manufacturers release car models”, as Tallosive Tech said it in a YouTube video yesterday..\
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Rumored Supported Models

• 2019 MacBook Pro or later
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• 2020 iMac or later
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• 2019 Mac Pro or later
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• Mac mini M1 or later
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• Mac Studio
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• 2020 MacBook Air later (M1 or Intel)
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Last week we briefly looked at what we knew so far about the upcoming version of macOS and where users generally are within the Apple Silicon transition.

• See also: WWDC ’25: New message stickers today, and what to expect then (05.15.2025)

According to the article on AppleInsider, the same sources which provided these rumored supported models this year were able to provide accurate details last year about macOS Sequoia and iOS 18. “..and provided us with exclusive details about Apple’s BlackPearl, Greymatter, and GreyParrot projects. They were also correct about the Ajax LLM, Freeform Scenes, and Apple’s Clean Up tool, among other things.”
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What’s known and a couple things to expect

• Internal May 2025 builds use macOS 16 in some parts as a placeholder
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• First developer beta is likely to be around 17 GB
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• New California-themed macOS name
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• Noteworthy from AppleInsider: “Apple has been known to rename OS features mid-development, so a shift back to “macOS 16″ isn’t entirely out of the question.”
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What this could mean for OCLP

The team over at Dortania (and anyone who works on this project) have done a phenomenal job piecing together Open Core Legacy Patcher over the years. macOS 26 may or may not pose new and unique challenges in being patched to work on older Macs, like some Mac “OS” releases in years’s past.

Mac OSes with major technical requirement changes:

• Mac OS X Leopard, cutting out PowerPC G3 CPUs
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• Snow Leopard, dropping PowerPC Macs
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• Lion, Dropping Macs using a 32-Bit EFI even if it has a 64-Bit CPU
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• Sierra requires SSE 4.1 to boot
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• Mojave requires a metal GPU and drops support for Maxwell/Pascal Nvidia GPUs while still also supporting older Kepler Nvidia GPUs.
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• Ventura requires AVX2 for much of the OS including graphical drivers
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T2 Chip Issues on OCLP

Right now you can’t get OCLP to install any newer version of macOS than what’s actually supported, specifically on a 2018 and 2019 MacBook Air. The details of this are explained in a support page in GitHub for OCLP. These 2 ‘Books are likely not gonna be able to run macOS 26 even patched, unfortunately.

Devices with the T1 security chip such as the 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro can be patched and work with OCLP, but what about T2 chip devices?

Macs rumored to be dropped from support which have a T2 security chip:

• The 2018 mini and 2018 MacBook Pro.
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• If these have the same issues as the MacBook Air, macOS Sequoia may very well be the final-final stop for those Macs.
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What do you think?

Let us know in the comments!