[sumuyuda]

I don’t think it’s fair to count security updates as continued support, as soon as the software/applications you are using drops support for your old version, you can’t use it anymore, forcing you to buy new hardware. It doesn’t matter that you have security updates when you can’t run the software you need.

Windows is much better in that there aren’t yearly releases obsoleting machines every year. You can run the latest version of Windows 10 on hardware older than 10 years.

[wlesieutre]

Grandparent comment said "You're really buying a transferable lease for 6-7 years on a device that has a hard stop to go to landfill after that time due to software obsolescence by way of unpatched vulnerabilities" and I was mostly looking at the second part of that

But for the first part, for a huge number of people all you need is a web browser and Microsoft office, which is supported on the 3 latest macOS versions, about the same window as the macOS security updates

Like I said it's not perfect but it's much better than 6 years

[highwaylights]

Even this isn’t the whole picture though as unpatched OS vulnerabilities would still leave you vulnerable as a consumer.