| Apple products are often obsolete in a few years, especially iPads and iPhones. The iPhone 6s was released September 2015 and it will run iOS 14, due later this summer/fall. My daily driver is a refurb iPhone 7 (released September 2016) and I'm running the public beta of iOS 14—it runs noticeably faster than it did running iOS 13 just a few weeks ago. I’m pretty sure nothing from Samsung, Motorola or HTC that's 4 or 5 years-old can run this year's Android release. Or even last year's. iPadOS 14 goes all the way back to the iPad Air 2, which was released October 2014—nearly 6 years ago. Their entire line of laptops and desktops is now practically obsolete with the move to ARM. Nope. All current Intel Macs will continue to be supported for years to come. Updated apps will be fat binaries—they'll run natively on Intel and ARM Macs, the same way fat binaries ran natively on PowerPC and 68K Macs back in the day. macOS 11.0 Big Sur will run natively on both Intel and ARM-based Macs; so will next year's macOS 11.1. All of the important, mainstream apps (Microsoft Office, Creative Suite, Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher, etc.) will be updated to run on ARM-based Macs in addition to the existing Intel ones. My last machine was a 10-year old 27-inch iMac that I still use as a server. I have several Apple devices that still boot up just fine, have capable CPUs inside, but are completely useless because Apple just decided they weren't interested in supporting them anymore. If they can still run Homebrew, there's lots of software, especially open source stuff, you can install and run. The core apps I use for web development like Vim, command line utilities, etc. work fine on unsupported Macs. If I had to, I could install FreeBSD or Linux and keep things moving. Most indie developers allow you to download older versions of their apps if you're a registered user. Macs that don't have 64-bit CPUs couldn't make the jump to 64-bit world, which Apple has been warning about for like 10-years. |
At least android phones can still download apps from the google app store, older iOS devices are just cut off. I have a perfectly good original iPad that's basically useless. The iPad 4 is similarly useless.
>My last machine was a 10-year old 27-inch iMac that I still use as a server.
My current workstation is 10 years old, running Windows 10 like a champ. It's got one of the first 6-core CPUs in it, a recent graphics card, and 32GB of RAM which I may upgrade to 64GB because it's cheap - I have no real reason to get a new workstation, this thing is still running circles around most recent quad-core systems. Your 10 year old mac wishes it were this capable.
I feel really sorry for anyone buying a mac now, since they will be obsolete as soon as the ARM macs are out.