I don’t think you’re making a fair comparison there really. You should be comparing Apple to someone like Dell, HP, Asus, etc.
What you’re really comparing Apple’s support to is your own, because you’re the one building and maintaining that PC’s hardware. Plus take a look at your 10 year old PC, does every component of it - motherboard, GPU, etc. still get security updates? Motherboards are one of the worst offenders in this area for just arbitrarily dropping support.
The fact that the PC ecosystem is so open is why it can last so long, but I don’t think it’s as imbalanced as you’re suggesting.
Absolutely and I think something a lot of people don’t realise is that something can absolutely work fine and still be unsupported. I dare say if we took at look at an average home-built PC, the vast majority would have some component to it that was out of support in some fashion.
Intel mac’s bought a couple years ago soon won’t be able to upgrade to the latest MacOS version, this same thing happened when they switched from PPC to Intel. On the other hand you can install Windows 10 on a pentium 2 and hell, of you could figure out a way to get tpm 2 to work you might be able to get 11 going. Some Linux distros with modern kernels only recently dropped support for PPC. Point being Apple ended support intentionally as they just don’t give a shit about their customers, their only interest is in money.
You’re talking about an entire architecture change, though. If you’re going to compare like-for-like, try installing Windows 11 on an ARMv7 machine, never mind that Microsoft frequently drops support for older processors anyway.
Yes, I have installed Windows 10 and 11 on ARM v7. Infact Windows CE was running on arm processors for a good long time with continued support. Windows hasn’t dropped support for any processors at all to my knowledge. Windows 11 required TPM2 but that’s not a processor. Your motherboard is the determining factor there, you can actually buy a TPM module for pretty dang cheap. Considering most PC manufacturers have had TPM on their systems used for a while it’s not a large factor. Those most impacted were people who did custom built systems and bought cheap motherboards. I actually mentioned this is my original comment but… Here we are I guess.
That’s fair, but also not really the point I was trying to make.
Excepting of Windows 11 (which even then you could just do registry edits), Windows will install on older computers. Linux sits in the same boat. Apple on the other hand has a tight lock on their software, and drivers, and arbitrarily decide “this hardware is too out of date” even though if you fuss around with it, you can get a newer version of MacOS running just fine.
This is less applicable now what with Apple’s transition to ARM, but it’s something I worry about down the line. How fast will your OS be out of date on the first generation M1s? In a year or two?
I still think you’re making unfair comparisons here. It’s more effort to get MacOS installed on unsupported hardware than Windows, but just because it installs doesn’t mean it’s supported. Just because a few registry hacks can get Windows 11 on an old machine doesn’t mean a future windows update won’t suddenly break it (I mean they break even supported configurations from time to time). I get what you’re saying, Apple do sure go out of their way to prevent it, but even if Windows let you install it, an unsupported configuration is still by definition out of support and it can just stop working at any time without much recourse.
I don’t think you’re making a fair comparison there really. You should be comparing Apple to someone like Dell, HP, Asus, etc.
What you’re really comparing Apple’s support to is your own, because you’re the one building and maintaining that PC’s hardware. Plus take a look at your 10 year old PC, does every component of it - motherboard, GPU, etc. still get security updates? Motherboards are one of the worst offenders in this area for just arbitrarily dropping support.
The fact that the PC ecosystem is so open is why it can last so long, but I don’t think it’s as imbalanced as you’re suggesting.
Disclosure: I don’t own any apple products
Even Desktop CPUs stop getting security updates. Intel 7th gen is on the chopping block soon.
Absolutely and I think something a lot of people don’t realise is that something can absolutely work fine and still be unsupported. I dare say if we took at look at an average home-built PC, the vast majority would have some component to it that was out of support in some fashion.
Intel mac’s bought a couple years ago soon won’t be able to upgrade to the latest MacOS version, this same thing happened when they switched from PPC to Intel. On the other hand you can install Windows 10 on a pentium 2 and hell, of you could figure out a way to get tpm 2 to work you might be able to get 11 going. Some Linux distros with modern kernels only recently dropped support for PPC. Point being Apple ended support intentionally as they just don’t give a shit about their customers, their only interest is in money.
You’re talking about an entire architecture change, though. If you’re going to compare like-for-like, try installing Windows 11 on an ARMv7 machine, never mind that Microsoft frequently drops support for older processors anyway.
Yes, I have installed Windows 10 and 11 on ARM v7. Infact Windows CE was running on arm processors for a good long time with continued support. Windows hasn’t dropped support for any processors at all to my knowledge. Windows 11 required TPM2 but that’s not a processor. Your motherboard is the determining factor there, you can actually buy a TPM module for pretty dang cheap. Considering most PC manufacturers have had TPM on their systems used for a while it’s not a large factor. Those most impacted were people who did custom built systems and bought cheap motherboards. I actually mentioned this is my original comment but… Here we are I guess.
That’s fair, but also not really the point I was trying to make.
Excepting of Windows 11 (which even then you could just do registry edits), Windows will install on older computers. Linux sits in the same boat. Apple on the other hand has a tight lock on their software, and drivers, and arbitrarily decide “this hardware is too out of date” even though if you fuss around with it, you can get a newer version of MacOS running just fine.
This is less applicable now what with Apple’s transition to ARM, but it’s something I worry about down the line. How fast will your OS be out of date on the first generation M1s? In a year or two?
I still think you’re making unfair comparisons here. It’s more effort to get MacOS installed on unsupported hardware than Windows, but just because it installs doesn’t mean it’s supported. Just because a few registry hacks can get Windows 11 on an old machine doesn’t mean a future windows update won’t suddenly break it (I mean they break even supported configurations from time to time). I get what you’re saying, Apple do sure go out of their way to prevent it, but even if Windows let you install it, an unsupported configuration is still by definition out of support and it can just stop working at any time without much recourse.