[kup0]

Apparently I should not have used the word forced because some people went full-boar pedantic about it unfortunately. It's forced in terms of "if I want to run Big Sur, I have no choice" (thought that was obvious).

Not forced, but unnecessarily required to purchase new hardware to run the latest OS version which should not have any reason for not working on the older hardware. I still think that's a problem.

If there was a feature of Big Sur that required particular hardware to run, then I would be more understanding. Yes, I can stay on Catalina on my iMac, but it will continue to get more out of date when Apple could have easily kept supporting it. I'm understanding enough to know Apple has business reasons for doing it, and maybe even technical ones (that no one has yet explained) but it doesn't mean I agree with it.

[valuearb]

This is so silly. First, Apple’s history is that they will continue to support older hardware with security updates even if they can’t support them with the latest OS.

Sometimes older hardware isn’t capable of supporting new features. In prior cases it might not have a 64 bit processor or not enough memory, and of course you can’t expect support in those cases.

In this it’s old WiFi hardware that can’t support new features. It would be dumb for Apple to take engineers off making Big Sur more solid for 98% of Macs to waste time on this problem for a tiny percent of the active base.

Apple is doing exactly the right thing. Make it work well for the vast majority, then see if they can take it farther back in the first couple of bug fix releases.