This is probably a testament more to Apple not having enough time to sprinkle in their proprietary magic dust following the transition to Intel x86 CPUs. Giving

This is probably a testament more to Apple not having enough time to sprinkle in their proprietary magic dust following the transition to Intel x86 CPUs. Giving Apple credit seems a bit misplaced if he had to jump through hoops just to install a few basic hardware upgrades and the most recent OS to work. It's a testament to how good the x58 (or the Xeon version (5520?)) chipset was, which spans Macs and PCs. My x58 PC lasted me ~7 years in grad school and the only reason I upgraded was opportunity/boredom. There was a ton of headroom with those 36 PCIE lanes and the longevity of those systems probably contributed to the relative stagnation of PC consumer hardware pre-Threadripper rumors. Intel even said (sometime around 2009) that they were predicting 50 core CPUs by ~2015, but then released nothing but 4-core and special edition 6 and 8 core CPUs. They didn't need to push things further because these early Core i supporting chipsets met the needs of most PC users.