My ~6 year old MacBook Pro (13" late 2016 model (with touchbar), purchased new in 2017) is no longer "supported" (no Ventura). As far as I can tell, linux does not support WiFi or audio on it, so it's pretty much a piece of trash as far as being a laptop once apps stop supporting macOS Monterey.
How many of these apps will drop support for Monterey within the coming year(s)? How many of your apps will actually stop working when there are no updates?
I think that if a Laptop lives for 6-8 years, that's quite good. If you don't think so, maybe Windows is a better fit for you because you can purchase fove (cheap) laptops for the price of one Mac. If you "need" your Mac for work, I think replacing it every 6-8 years shouldn't be an issue.
Why buy 5 Windows laptops for the price of one Mac when one PC laptop can be supported for 2-3 times as long? You can run Windows 10 on a ThinkPad T60 from 2006. Windows 10 will get support until 2025. That's 19 years support from one machine. Use a Linux distro and get even more.
Why spend more for a Mac if you get less useful life and are constantly having to repurchase software from OS upgrades breaking stuff?
I think you're missing my point a bit. Sure, if you even want longer support, don't purchase a laptop. Cheapest lifelong option...
My point was that the argument "apps won't run anymore" may be true, but there's no evidence for that. There are a lot of people running 10 year old Macs and the software does not just break.
As a lifelong Intel/MS user in my early 40s, I've been staring down an M1 Mac Studio and thinking hard about this.
I had a 2006 Dell Inspiron Laptop that I got for less than $1000 from the Dell Outlet, that came with Vista XP, and through various promotions had been able to upgrade the OS all the way to Windows 10, legitimately - and I think I might have only paid $60 for the Win 7 upgrade. About six year ago, I donated the laptop (the internal wifi card was spotty, and with 4gb of RAM, it wasn't much for multitasking).
Similarly, I've got a Dell Desktop with an i7 processor that's 11 years old, which through the magic of SSDs and the occasional video card upgrade, continues to do a solid job with the creative work I do in Photoshop, multitrack audio, Sketchup, and Twinmotion.
Ten years ago, I started using a Macbook Pro at work because internally, we switched to Ruby on Rails for the ecommerce platform we built. I was asked if I wanted to keep working in Windows, but basically everyone building in RoR was on a Macbook, so why swim against the current? I'll spare a this vs that comparison, and leave it to say that (muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts aside) I eventually was okay with working on a Mac. It also gave me a lot more exposure to Apple culture, for better and for worse. A lot of it was insufferable idolatry and ideological pontification - but I started to understand, if not necessarily agree with, the product lifecycle in Apple. I had a 2013 Macbook Pro, it was still working fine, but I traded it last year towards my first iPad (now that they had USB-C and more of a creative focus than a consumption focus, I was willing to take the plunge)
It's a lot like leasing cars. I'm someone who tries to drive a car into the ground, proverbially - I do regularly maintenance though, so it's more like after 10-15 years, the safety improvements on modern vehicles outweigh the cost advantage of driving something I paid off a decade ago.
Back to Apple - once they got serious about recycling, the pattern became: you spend a bunch of money up front, and then you just keep trading your hardware in for the latest version. I would hold onto my iPhone for three product cycles because I spent a lot of money on it and I was going to eek out every last cent. But with Apple, you have a large initial outlay, and you can leverage the trade-in as almost a kind of hardware subscription. They've got a solid backup/recovery process that makes this really, really simple. And I kinda get it, the way I kinda get why some people lease cars instead of buy. Get a Mac with AppleCare and upgrade it every year or two, and that premium you pay essentially means you don't have to think too hard about breaking your computer, and you're always within a year or two of the latest, greatest hardware.
It still costs more, no doubt about that. But like with a leased car, you kinda don't have to worry about maintenance. With cars and computers, I do a lot of work myself, but I'm getting to a point in life where I just don't care about doing that anymore, and I have better financial resources, and I'm thinking real hard about going with size, power, and performance of a Mac Studio, knowing that it means reshaping my relationship with computers. The fact that they've been reducing or eliminating proprietary connectors in recent years has played a very large factor in swaying me in this direction too, I'd add, while knowing that it's still very much Apple culture to charge you $30 for $0.35 worth of cable.
> A lot of it was insufferable idolatry and ideological pontification - but I started to understand, if not necessarily agree with, the product lifecycle in Apple.
I have an iPhone and iPad as well as a hackintosh.
I will never for the life of me understand the apple ideology. It is almost like some of these people's whole identify is tied to a company they neither own or work for?
Sure apple does make some great stuff, but they also make crap and have a history of bad choices (dock, firewire and lightening come to mind).
what i have a serious issue with is the artificial limits on OS updates. Clearly if Opencore legacy patcher gets the OS on the laptop apple intentionally blocked it?
Many who have used Opencore are happy with the experience so why exactly did MacOS refuse to install?
It's funny you mention Firewire. Up until last year, I was using a Firewire audio device with my Win10 machine - it was released in 2007, and the last driver update was in 2012. Even though official support had dropped a decade ago, it still worked. Because of the architecture of Firewire vs USB, if you wanted a lot of high speed I/O, Firewire was the way to go - as long as you weren't running a Mac. While researching the Mac Studio and its M1 processor, I read some rather pathetic stories of using a series of dongles - Firewire -> USB -> Thunderbolt (or some such chain), and some hackery to get old drivers installed.
I decided I'm in a comfortable enough place now that I can upgrade to a modern interface... without getting too into the weeds, I replaced an outboard mixer and two Firewire interfaces with a smaller, higher quality analog hybrid device that runs USB-C. And funnily enough, I've nearly recouped the cost of the purchase by selling my old gear.
Hanging on to old equipment just does not fit the Apple model. Trade in early, trade in often, or get stuck on old architecture, and get phased out of the upgrade path. I've got a 2015 Macbook Pro I should have traded in the moment I heard about the M1 processor. It was the vintage to have, and now I'd be lucky if I got $400 for it.
Anyway... there is a large portion of the human population that seeks out and worships idols. It's like any rational part of their brain decides that with THIS person, they can relax things like curiosity or critique. If I keep typing about the topic, I'm going to start saying unpleasant things that will no doubt upset people, so I'll just leave it at that.
Recently my old MBP (2013 model) stopped working, with a mysterious kernel process taking up max CPU to grind everything to a halt on every boot. Fortunately I had its files backed up to a disk in Linux-compatible format (ExFAT32?), so I finally decided to wipe it clean and install Pop!_OS. https://pop.system76.com/
It gave new life to the laptop - I'd recommend trying it, you might be able to get more mileage out of the machine.
It has that whole "MacOS" dock look and feel right out of the box.
Good that you found an alternative OS and kept your old mac running. So many people seem content to spend big money on a Mac laptop, have it reach EOL and become landfill as they run out and buy a new one.
Ubuntu Budgie looks nice, thanks for mentioning it - I'll try it sometime.
An old Macbook with an Ubuntu variant is a nice combination of sturdy hardware, light(er)-weight operating system, and well-designed user interface. In a way, it feels more like the spirit of "Macintosh". And it would make for a good educational/toy computer for children and young people. If I see an opportunity, like family or friends who have old laptops or computers, I'm going to offer to set it up for them.
You have another couple years until apps stop supporting Monterey. That said, I think it was a poor decision by Apple to drop the 2016 version but keep the 2017.
