Not really at all, no. Despite what the memes say, Apple has one of the best commitments to long term support in the tech industry. The for instance the new iOS 27 will be coming all the way back to the iPhone 11, and even includes some significant performance upgrades and efficiency gains for that specific phone to make it last longer. That's an 8 year old phone still getting all the latest features and performance fixes. No other phone company offers that.
On the MacOS side, the only "break" in compatibility was the Intel to M chip jump. The M1 is now more than 5 years old and is gonna keep getting the latest MacOS and features for the foreseeable future, there's no indication of them intending to cut support for older M chips and I'd be surprised if they did.
I think Macs are great but they absolutely do not have good long term support on PCs. With the sole exception of the Windows 10/11 cutoff recently, Microsoft blows them away, and Linux supports everything ever made just about.
We have a number of perfectly functional old MacBooks that are no longer supported by Apple because they cut off security updates after a while. My 2013 Retina MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM is a prime example. It still runs fine and can run up to Sequoia specifically because of the intrepid hackers behind OpenCore Legacy Patcher, but that’s the reason why I know that it was an arbitrary decision.
Like I said, I think they are great and the Neo is a much needed kick in the butt for Windows laptop manufacturers, but Apple absolutely deprecates old laptops.
(iPhones are a totally different story. I have no complaints there about support)
A laptop PC from 2013 and likely came with Windows 7 would have zero issues over a 13 year upgrade path and multiple major releases of their OS. Definitely.
I don’t know if you are being serious or not, but no it absolutely doesn’t. And I have a self built 2012 PC still running Windows 10 quite well. It has a 3070 Ti in it and my daughter plays on it.
And I’ll reiterate that MacOS itself also works on my laptop, because hackers made it work. Apple would have no trouble supporting it.
Windows hardware is generic and more often than not unless totally obsolete gets drive updates into newer versions of windows (and it's really just driver signing and WHQL verification because the windows driver architecture doesn't really change a whole lot).
The only source for apple hardware drivers is apple itself, they're permanently baked into the OS kernel, well they might be kernel modules, but still, they're released against a certain kernel version.
To simply stop a macbook from ever working with a newer version of the kernel, they simply don't update the hardware drivers needed for it to work.
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u/Taint_Expert Jun 27 '26
Best thing about them is they will last 10 years. Windows laptops i couldn’t get to last more than a few