[chii]

> it couldn’t run latest macOS, and software support for the old version it could run was increasingly going away.

which is very annoying, as none of the newer OS versions has anything that warrants dumping hardware to buy brand new to run them with! With the exception of security upgrades, which i find dubious for a company to stop creating (as they would need to do so for their newer OS versions just as well, so the cost of maintaining security patches ought to not be much, if at all), it is definitely more likely to be a dark-pattern to force hardware upgrades.

[speed_spread]

That's not just a dark pattern, it's the logical conclusion to Apple's entire business model. It's what you get for relying on the proprietary OS supplied by a hardware manufacturer. It's why Asahi Linux is so important.

[Narishma]

I'm not sure I agree. Open source software also regularly drops support for old hardware and OSes.

[em3rgent0rdr]

"regularly" is doing a lot of work here. When Linux drops hardware support, we are talking about ancient hardware. An example of a regular drop: Linux 6.15 just a month ago dropped support for 486 (from 1989)!

[cout]

That's surprising. What is the 486 missing that Linux needs? Or is it that there are no volunteers to test and maintain Linux on a 486 (as often happens with older architectures)?

[detaro]

It needs a bunch of compatibility code and the maintainers felt it wasn't worth the effort of taking care of that anymore:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250425084216.3913608-1-mingo@...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wicfBCyMj_x5BiL32o55jqXfn...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wjCiEk-kc-vOug2GKJdhHKce3...

[SlowTao]

Pretty much, you can still get modern distros that support 32bit PowerPC.

[teddyh]

Open source software drops hardware support only when there are nobody left who volunteers to support that hardware. When does this happen? It happens when there are not enough users left of that hardware.

As long as there are enough users of some hardware, free software will support it, because the users of that hardware want it to.

[skeeter2020]

Is "regularly" every 2-4 years, or longer? What are your options? With Apple you have none. It's really not a comparable situation.

[scarface_74]

And then he still couldn’t use the third party software he says he depends on…

[wat10000]

Depending on how much has changed in the interval, backporting security fixes can be completely trivial, very difficult, or anywhere in between. There may not even be a fix to backport, as not all vulnerabilities are still present in the latest release.

[scarface_74]

You mean besides the fact that they completely transitioned to a new processors and some of the new features use hardware that is only available on their ARM chips?

Also he said that software from third parties also don’t support the older OS so even if Apple did provide security updates, he would still be in the same place.