I’ve been bitten by hardware changes myself, some of them have cost me access to periperals that should have been easy to keep supported, and I’ve raged myself quite a bit.
Apple’s move from Intel followed an unhappy period in which Intel wasn’t delivering what Apple thought it needed to keep its customers happy. Since Apple had invested in CPU development in order to supply its handheld products better than third parties would, Apple had an inside line on how much energy Apple could save and how much more battery life Apple could deliver if it used its own CPUs.
I still use a mid-2014 Intel mac for a few things that won’t run on a modern OS, but I don’t know anybody who has experienced the Macs with “Apple Silicon” who would go back. It’s quieter, it’s really fast, and if you use a notebook the performance per watt will delight you as you will no longer live in fear of distance to or availability of power sockets. The ecological aspect of this is pretty strong: the last Mac I retired, last year, went into service during 2010. The outlook for a new Mac to have a 10-year service life is pretty strong, especially since no Mac depends any longer on a spinning hard drive. I would not be shocked if the cool-running, solid-state-storage-using, quiet M4 Macs now selling lasted fifteen or twenty years – using less power every day of the time.
I don’t know if Rhino for Intel can run under one of the new 64-bit WINE products (some PC games do) or can run under the Game Porting Toolkit, but I’d check that out before worrying you need two machines.
Apple hasn’t sold an Intel machine in years. The first Apple Silicon was announced nearly five years ago. Apple will continue supporting Intel machines through its next OS release. I’m getting a lot more life out of my Macs than I ever did out of a PC clone selling an Intel machine, and I’m getting a lot more performance from my Apple Silicon machines than I ever did anything from Intel. Apple isn’t pushing some kind of replacement scheme or forced obsolescence; the problem isn’t Apple pushing you off something that should be serviceable, it’s that you want new software that’s no longer being made for machines that were last sold five years ago. If you wanted to keep running your 5yo kit, like I am still running my 2014 MacBook, you could do it and Apple would not lift a finger to thwart you. My 2014 machine is valuable because I intend to run software nobody is maintaining and that I can’t update. McNeel is actually updating Rhino and Apple’s new hardware is doing things no Intel box ever offered Mac users.
Running the latest software will push you toward newer hardware faster than the hardware would make you, precisely because developers’ ability to support numerous no-longer-made hardware classes would drive up their costs and you don’t want to pay that kind of cost. I sure don’t.
Your use case has special risks. I use my machine in my work; I can sell the work I do on my machine, and having a machine that improves my quality of life makes my work and my life more pleasant; I don’t mind buying a new machine when it offers such dramatically different capability that new software can’t even run on it (and that’s what’s happening: recent years have brought huge advances to what Macs can do in hardware, including things like raytracing and mesh calculations that matter a lot to some users, even if they don’t play Assassin’s Creed). Your situation sounds like you need a school to buy hardware and schools are notoriously tightfisted, and they don’t see computers as generating revenue but as consuming capital. That is distressing. I get it.
I don’t think the source of that problem is McNeel or Apple, though. My own school (I work, but I’ve joined a graduate program) hasn’t even upgraded to Rhino 8 as far as I can tell. I’m using a self-bought student license because the quality of life upgrade is tremendous. Rhino 8 on Apple Silicon beat the tar out of Rhino 7 on either architecture on Mac (I’ve never run Rhino on the other OS, I’ve suffered enough through it and am entitled to better now). The stability improvement was tremendous. Losing data and time to crashes was really unpleasant.
May I humbly suggest that, as an experiment, you download Rhino on a demo Mac at an Apple Store and see what you think? Torture it with work you know taxes the machines you know. See if you’re not convinced. The more things McNeel makes multithreaded, the more the Mac will rock them.
And if you’re worried about electronic scrap, Apple recycles any Mac you bring it, no questions and no fee. Well, there’s questions: do you need a receipt? I can’t imagine why, so I always say “no.” I’ve never had a “PC” that lasted anything like the last several Macs I’ve had. Apple is easily the leader here in durability, energy savings, long-term cost of ownership, and any other measure that looks beyond sticker price. Sometimes Apple wows on sticker price, too, but I’m in machines for the long run and Apple’s lead in long-term value keeps me coming back. (Also, I’ve experienced the alternative, thanks. I’ve been using computers since the TRS-80 Model I launched in 1977, and I remember Windows 1.0 when years later that was launched. I’m not into Apple because it made candy-colored computers, I started using Apple’s machines because I’d seen what kinds of tortures Unix tolerated in university settings and I’d experienced the commercially popular alternative and I made my informed choice.)
