Been running on a PowerMac G5 until last week, now seven full years old before losing Apple support. My early 1999 iMac was upgradeable to OS 10.2.8 and I replaced in 2005 after six years of dedicated service. My G4 mini is still being used as a browser/ mail station in the Maine cabin.. circa summer 2005 but is stuck in Leopard forever. I intentionally waited for the Sandy Bridge chipset and chose the i7 quad mini for my latest upgrade, as multi-thread multi-core performance intel chips are new enough that I expect to have many productive years ahead for the new Mac mini.
Performance wise, your i3 has been obsolete since six months after its release.😱
If you've ever tried to put something new on a customer's old pc still running Windows 2000, you would agree with me that certain things were not meant to last forever, computers and operating systems being one of these. But Apple makes computers that are reliable and outlive their usefulness in my experience, which is a positive thing.
