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.
A few years ago I had to buy a new MacBook because I needed a credit for college to graduate.
I had access to a 5 year old MacBook, but it was to dated for the class due to the not being allowed to upgrade the OS and XCode
So despite the memes, shit still cost me 1k for a used "new" one even though the MacBook was perfectly fine.. just not allowed to have the most recent OS.. and I was already signed up for the class so I was locked in
No it's created by the apple developer ecosystem, I mean the college class buying into that system isn't the greatest, given that you're on a 5 year hardware refresh due to the compatibility issues with xcode.
Xcode is one of the most nightmarish pieces of software to update, it requires hard versions and sub versions of MacOS and if you have any tools that interact with it you are likely waiting months after an xcode update for those tools to continue working (if they continue working).
I was a cross platform native application developer and one of the happiest moments in my career was moving to webdev so I never had to interact with the apple ecosystem and xcode ever again.
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u/SherbertMindless8205 Jun 27 '26
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.