[beagle3]

My early-2013 (7.5 years old now) will be getting Big Sur and 3-4 years support after that.

And it still works like new - something that I’ve never heard about a similarly aged Win19 device unless it was very recently reinstalled.

You’re likely to have problems finding drivers for your other hardware, though - especially 10-year old printers or scanners (even though they are likely to work out of the box on Modern Mac and Linux)

[Voliokis]

Currently working part-time as a PC technician. Recently had a 10 year old PC here that had to be upgraded to W10. Did Microsoft complain? Nope. I replaced the HDD with an SSD and it ran fine. I've done this with 10 year old laptops too. I simply prefer a platform that doesn't decide for me whether I'm allowed to install it or not. And any device that runs fine on W10 now will most likely run it fine in the future too. Microsoft isn't going to "drop support" for old devices just because they're tired of supporting it. It's like you Apple guys literally have Stockholm syndrome, rationalizing this crap to yourselves.

And you'd be surprised what kind of old hardware still works on W10.

[beagle3]

I’m not an Apple person, I’m a Linux person although I do have one old Mac as well (that will be retired when it stops being useful - likely in 3-4 years).

I’ve tried to help family who were tricked into a win10 upgrade by the dark patterns of the “free upgrade to win 10” window. Some had to buy new printers/scanners because win 10 didn’t support their perfectly-working in XP and win7 ones. (My modern Linux Laptop had no such problems). Also a WinModem of some sort used as a built in fax machine.

As a Linux person, I find it funny that you refer to Windows as “platform that allows me to install or not”. It allows you to install but as of Win10, unless you are on Enterprise or LTSB, it doesn’t let you not install. It’s no longer your machine - you paid for it, but it’s Microsoft’s to manage/brick as they see fit.