A weird way of seeing it. I prefer, Apple doesn't bog down new machines maintaining support for legacy software and hardware. If anything, Apple's issue is that they update their hardware so irregularly that when it comes time to upgrade they are still selling the same stuff.
That's exactly the same as with OS X; it's just standard for operating system releases - you can install the latest MacOS on macs a few generations older with some workarounds.
That's nonsense. The reason is that Windows is backwards compatible to the dark ages with older *software* while Apple has no problem making changes that break (some) apps written for an old version of macOS either completely (like 32-bit apps) or partially (like apps designed for an older version of macOS that run but end up with weirdly places UI elements because their properties changed or random crashes because some undocumented assumption no longer holds).
Windows 11 is actually the first new version of Windows to drop support for older hardware.
Your "reason" doesn't make what I said any less true.
The entry level Surface Book 2 does not support it as it uses the old Core i5-7300U processor. That's likely why Microsoft did a stealth update to the Surface Book 2 line and swapped the entry level processor to a newer variant two years ago.
i Was able to get and run new MacOS releases on my 2012 iMac until MacOS Big Sur in 2020. That was almost 8 years and it is still running Catalina, which is still supported by Apple with security update releases.
Although I'm not debating your reasoning here, because I was also apprehensive. But Running Windows on my M1 MBP really makes it seem more like just an App as opposed to an entire OS. It runs great. It would be WONDERFUL to be able to utilize ALL of my MBP's power and 16GB, but at least for me, I can still have Safari, Mail, Reeder, Photos, Find My, Messages, Tweetbot, Music, MS Edge... ALL running just fine while I'm also running Windows 10 and now 11 in it's own Full Screen window. If you've got 16GB of RAM on an M1, you can easily set 4GB aside to Windows along with 2 Processor Cores. Runs great.
Yeah but Microsoft can and most likely will need to walk back their aggressive stance on cutting off hardware demands to appeal customers, where Apple has zero obligation to do so.
I've got macOS 12 running on my older 2015 MBP along with Windows 11 in Bootcamp. That's a 6 year old machine that looks like it'll keep getting updates for at least another year. There's some recent Surface Pro machines that won't see Win11 at all.
Let's be real. They would sell it for $200, but they would likely put it in the App store.
I'm the same here - my Mac is a 2009 Mac Pro (heavily upgraded). Although I know it's possible to run Big Sur on it, I've not bothered to update it because I don't want to run the risk of accidentally clicking update and then having to dig out a recovery usb to fix it. Maybe not an issue but in my days of hackintoshing that could often happen, admittedly usually due to the Nvidia driver and I'm now using ATI cards but still, I need my Mac to work reliably so I'm not taking any chances. I'm hoping for an M2 or M2X machine too. Maybe a new Mac Pro when they finally come out or maybe an iMac Pro or Mac Mini Pro or something. I'd like a *lot* more RAM than they currently offer on the M1 machines though - I'm currently at 85gb of 96gb used. Roughly 30gb is by two VMs though, so 64GB would likely be more than enough.
