[antaviana]

My greatest concern about Mac hardware is that they are perfectly operational by the time software-driven programmed obsolescence comes its way, even when it is a nice problem to have. I have 3 iMacs 27 (2019) which have a gorgeous display, but the lack of software updates to the OS effectively bricks them via enterprise conditional access rules or with the ongoing drop of legacy OS support by key apps. This programmed obsolescence feels as a huge resource waste. It should not be allowed, if anything for environmental reasons.

[robertjpayne]

I'd still say getting 7 years of free OS supports for hardware is pretty incredible. All-in-ones like iMacs are always going to be wasteful on the environmental side of things faster because displays will outlive the usefulness of the rest of it by a large large margin.

At least Apple does try a bit to be a responsible recycler and you can always take your old hardware to them.

[baq]

I have a 2019 GPU in my windows box and I’d be pissed off if it stopped working in the next few years. Computers nowadays are useful for much longer than they used to. Spectre class vulnerabilities which take 50% performance to properly (kinda) mitigate are the only reason to maybe upgrade if all you do is browse facebook and pay bills.

[kalleboo]

7 years is generous for phones but desktop computers have had a much slower performance ramp up where even a 10 year old desktop should be perfectly cromulent for office tasks as long as you give it an SSD and enough RAM.

The sad thing is that newer macOS versions do still work really well on these unsupported machines - OpenCore Legacy Patcher proves it. All Apple would need to do is spend some time testing things, there's nothing to actually implement to make it work.

Isn't Apple supposed to be a services company now anyway, making money off of this installed base with cloud subscriptions?

[taude]

How is the OS Free? It's part of what you pay for.

I have a 11 year old PC -- running Cosmos now, and it's still faster than my hobbled M4 PRO with 48 GB, work mac with all it's corp spyware cruft on it.

We should expect more than 7 years out of all our tech hardware.

EDIT: I say this as a person who spent a couple weekends trying to get various forms of Linux running on a 2017 Macbook Pro, because it was stuck on VEntura.

[bombcar]

In the bad (good?) old days Mac OS X cost money each upgrade.

[Danox]

Once every 2 years or so.

[gt0]

Free OS updates is the norm now though. If you'd bought a Windows PC 7 years ago, or used Linux, or just about any other desktop OS, you'd have had free updates.

[SanDiegoSun]

I guess you forgot about windows TPM controversy. Comments like this make me realize a good majority have no idea what they are talking about and still decide to voice an uninformed opinion.

[juancn]

They get updates forever, and even after they're usable anyway.

They even get serious security updates even after that period, and you can install linux if you really want to, but it makes no sense to me.

[Telaneo]

Linux has pretty good support for Macs, since they're so common (the T2 chip made it more annoying, but it's still very possible). That said, it's still Linux, for better or worse.

If nothing else, it'd be nice if those iMacs could be reused as external displays, but nope. No display-in on them, so no dice (at least not without a lot of dicking about).