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It happens every so often: Apple declares certain older products obsolete or vintage. Vintage machines are those made between five and seven years ago, and obsolete machines are those made more than seven years ago. (Though in terms of support, the two terms really mean the same thing everywhere but in California.)

What’s been interesting of late is the amount of Macs on the list that are still in fairly heavy use, and really don’t seem that old. Think the lampshade iMac, PowerBook G4, iBook, and PowerMac G4s. Notice how I just named pretty much every G4 product? Yeah, the G4s are close to being obsolete entirely, and the G5s are next in line. Apple made the transition to Intel chips complete in December 2006, and it’s entire consumer line was Intel In August of ‘06. This means that in August of 2011, Every G5 will be vintage, and Apple will be obligated only to support Intel machines. Of course, we are seeing signs of this already, with it heavily suspected that Snow Leopard is Intel-only, and many features of iLife ‘09 being Intel or Power Mac and iMac G5 limited.

The latest machines to be deemed vintage and obsolete are as follows:

Vintage

• Xserve RAID
• Xserve (Slot Load)
• Xserve (Cluster Node)

Obsolete

• PowerBook G4
• Power Mac G4 (Digital Audio)
• Power Mac G4 (Quicksilver)
• Macintosh Server G4 (Digital Audio)
• Macintosh Server G4 (Quicksilver)

See the whole list at support.apple.com.