Apple has been top of the industry in terms of length of OS/software support for their devices.
My iPhone 8 is still supported by the current iOS (no longer by 17, womp womp.) It's nearly seven years old, is still on its first battery with about 79% capacity left and it hasn't gone into brownout-prevention mode yet. I'm figuring that with the new iOS release it probably won't be supported, but who knows.
A few whiz-bang features aren't supported; fancy but kinda useless webcam stuff, and newer iPhones can do more extensive object recognition in photos like bugs and plants that I think my phone won't do.
I'm not missing much aside from better cellular band support, which is kind of a wash because my phone has a qualcomm modem and Apple's switch to intel modems didn't go well.
Even the newer cameras aren't tempting because a generation or two after the 8 and X, they all became inflicted with Apple's horrifically bad "AI" image processing that makes everything look like a watercolor painting.
The average lifespan of a desktop is five years, and for a laptop, 3-5. All of you bitching about how computers older than ten years old not being supported is some massive injustice are completely divorced from reality in the marketplace.
Apple provides security updates for the prior two releases, which means that damn near any Mac made in the last ten years, even without Opencore Legacy, is still receiving security updates.
My 2013 Macbook Pro will run the current MacOS release with Opencore Legacy. That's a now-ten-year-old computer running the current OS release.
Anyone who uses their computer for a significant period of time, and especially to make money, who does not upgrade more quickly than every ten years, isn't very smart. It doesn't take long, waiting for your computer every day, before it's costing you more in lost productivity than it would be to replace it with something newer, especially if you buy used.
Claiming that a ten year old laptop, Apple or otherwise, is "perfectly usable" is a joke by people who clearly haven't spent any appreciable time using current hardware, which is by every single measure enormously better.
> Apple has been top of the industry in terms of length of OS/software support for their devices.
For phones and tablets, sure. For desktops/laptops, Linux outdoes them handily. My mid-2012 MacBook Pro can run Catalina at the latest, which has been outdated for several years and unsupported since last year. But I can still install a current Linux distro on a machine of that era just fine.
This doesn’t absolve Apple of their lack of support for older Macs, but if you want to keep using that MacBook on a more modern MacOS, take a look at Open Core Legacy Patcher. Have Monterey on my 2012 Mac mini and it’s working great.
My iPhone 8 is still supported by the current iOS (no longer by 17, womp womp.) It's nearly seven years old, is still on its first battery with about 79% capacity left and it hasn't gone into brownout-prevention mode yet. I'm figuring that with the new iOS release it probably won't be supported, but who knows.
A few whiz-bang features aren't supported; fancy but kinda useless webcam stuff, and newer iPhones can do more extensive object recognition in photos like bugs and plants that I think my phone won't do.
I'm not missing much aside from better cellular band support, which is kind of a wash because my phone has a qualcomm modem and Apple's switch to intel modems didn't go well.
Even the newer cameras aren't tempting because a generation or two after the 8 and X, they all became inflicted with Apple's horrifically bad "AI" image processing that makes everything look like a watercolor painting.