this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Apple's current 7 year cutoff includes radical evolutions of hardware over recent years.
The latest cutoff, as far as I know, is Macs that typically were sold with a spinning rust HDD - which are honestly useable anyway on the new filesystem which has been designed from the ground up for SSDs. Modern MacOS just can't cope with seek time lag to access the disk.
The big cutoff before that was transitioning from 32 bit to 64 bit CPUs. And the next cutoff will be from x86 to ARM.
Apple doesn't have a hard cutoff - they have a "we will support as far back as we can" cutoff, which is a combination of the cost required to keep it compatible and the number of actual users on old hardware.
Also - even after things are no-longer "supported" they often still get security patches from Apple. Especially if something is actually being exploited.
I’m well aware of the developments, but fact is that it would be trivial to support these devices, they just choose not to.
Assuming that Apple makes “informed” decisions based on the number of active devices is just ridiculous. Apart from the abysmal 2016 and up Intel-based MBP machines there is plenty of great and capable hardware out there.
Both my 2011 MBA and 2014 MBP (late 2013 model which honestly holds up way better than my 2018 MBP) have both gone out of favor [1], but they both have SSD’s and are fully capable of running 64-bit software.
Apart from the security coprocessor for touchID there’s very little difference between these and the machines that are currently supported.
As for Apples willingness and ability to deliver software updates to earlier, but still officially supported versions of MacOS - there are considerable issues and concerns [2].
1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213264 2: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/psa-apple-isnt-actually-patching-all-the-security-holes-in-older-versions-of-macos/