[spaceguillotine]

replaced my MacBook Pro after 10 years, not having the latest OS didn't bother me at all with it. Only had to spend $100 on a new battery for it after 5 years. in total, came out to $10.83 a month for the life of my MBP and it still works i just finally needed the ARM version for something.

[vinay_ys]

My experience has been similar. I'm still using my early 2013 MPB with original battery (it has been saying replace battery for last 2 years but I have not bothered). It still gets security updates and works perfectly fine for everyday personal use. I used iPhone 5 for 5 years, then iPhone 7 Plus for another 5 years, now on iPhone 12 which will easily last 5 years. Btw, at each upgrade the phone was perfectly fine and traded in for good value and I decided to upgrade because they genuinely had better and more useful hardware to go with upgraded software. For data backups and cloud services, I use different things for photos vs files vs music etc. I'm not locked into iCloud and I don't find apple is coercing either.

[cassianoleal]

How do you backup photos without iCloud?

I know it's possible, and I have a janky solution myself, but it really seems like iCloud is the only way to go without going through lots of hoops and still having a solution that's imperfect at best.

[vinay_ys]

Google Photos does a great job.

[cassianoleal]

How does it work? Not that I'd move from iCloud to Google, but I'm curious. Does it integrate with the Photos app in some way?

[highwaylights]

Depends on use case. You can probably get by just fine on unsupported software depending on what you’re doing.

If you’re really careful not to enter any bank/credit card/personal information it’s probably fine to use an unsupported laptop, but then you’re having to consider how much you trust your own computer which you didn’t before.