This is what I try and do, but I'd say 90 percent of customers don't know. Apple doesn't advertise its products with years on them - ie people walking into Apple stores/other places of purchase looking for what they expect to be a new product don't realise they're looking at old machines - ie MacBook Air 2017 (which is honestly just a 2015) being sold as brand new in 2019 - what's worse is that in 2019 buyers then were faced with the choice of a known faulty keyboard design or a basically 4 year old laptop at premium prices.
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Newest macOS 13 Ventura only for hardware up to 5 years old. Up until recently Macs received the newest OS usually for 7 years.
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It’s a problem. Many Macs which are still perfectly good hardware-wise end up going out of software support, and after 12 years or so start to encounter problems with browser security certificates and so aren’t usable anymore for many basic tasks.
True. You know - you think they’d offer a maintenance contract for older releases. That’s the long money.
Hmm yeah I did a boob upgrading my main work machine to Ventura. It works for 95% of things but there are Mail bugs and external back up drive bugs.
The problem nowadays is computers are powerful enough to support updates for at least 10 years. It's not normal that a 20215 Mac with a SSD,, a i7 processor and more than 8GB of ram don'r have the latest OS. Computers aren't smartphones. It's not a thing you want to change every 3-5 years for the majority of people.
I try to upgrade my home computer at least every 5-7 years. Even with Windows the software is updated and designed for newer/faster chips. Things change too fast to upgrade longer than 7 years, at that point you start having interoperability, security, and compatibility problems.
Personally I am an IT consultant and I'd say a moderate power user and I am still using my Mid 2012 MacBook Pro. The only reason that interoperability, security and compatibility problems arise is when Apple (and now Microsoft) arbitrarily cut off old hardware that's perfectly capable of running the new software.
Machines from 2012, and even earlier are still *more* than capable of doing what most people do with a computer these days.
If you are willing to wait for most operations. I get tired of the beach balls on such an old machine.
With an SSD and 16GB of ram, it's more than fast enough for me. Yes there are the occasional beachballs here and there, but it's not that much slower than a new machine. Getting into video and photo editing is another story but for what most people use a machine for, it's perfectly acceptable speed wise.
I guess my experience is with a 2012 iMac without SSD that just loves the beach balls. That and my 2011 11” Air that has a super slow processor.
2012 era Macs without SSDs are an avosulte nightmare - really any Mac without an SSD is a nightmare these days. MacOS is so bloated and un-optimised and has been for 5+ years unfortunately.
Currently I am using my old 2014 iMac retina (512GB SSD, 16 GB RAM) and a 2020 iMac with maxes out CPU and GPU, 64GB RAM and 4TB SSD.
In the daily work I feel no difference, in fact I was disappointed about the speed when first setting up the 2020 iMac. Sure, there are occasions where it is much fast, probably I am just not using them to much.
An entirely different case was switching from my 2010 iMac with HDD and 12GB RAM, this is barely unusable anymore.
I also have a 2008 MacBook Pro wit 8GB RAM, I changed the HDD to a SSD and installed Linux. I use it for testing purposes and it is still very much usable.
So I guess as long as you have enough RAM and a SSD you can use the Macs much longer than Apple provides updates. Quite sad for a company that mentions the environmental impact in every presentation...
There is no such thing as Apple device without 3rd party components. I would really like to see how Apple could manufacture their own RAM chips, SSD controller chips, SSD flash chips, camera sensor chips, power distribution chips... you sure understand that this list can get quite long...
This is the sad part about it all. It's all arbitrary. If hobbyists can reverse engineer MacOS in their spare time onto devices which have been unsupported now for years, then it would be very simple for Apple. Would love to see Apple actually be the environtmeally friendly company it claims to be and stop arbitrarily dropping support for Macs.