Dropping of 10.7 cuts off machines from 2006. That'll be about 10 years of support, which isn't too bad IMHO.
I know it's a notoriously underpowered machine, but it still would have been nice to get more than 4.5 years of supported OS updates. Still perfectly functional as a portable secondary machine for mail, notes, terminal and light Chrome browsing.
Apparently they didn't want to continue to support 32-bit EFI.
http://www.apple.com/uk/osx/how-to-upgrade/
which says you can upgrade directly. What goes wrong? I upgraded 10.5 to latest 10.5 then bought 10.6 in store and got to 10.6.8 a year or so ago. I recently upgraded another machine to 10.6.8 too.
I find free, smooth upgrades (not just updates) for a decade to be pretty good but guess you are having problems with "smooth".
I don't think it's reasonable to expect third parties to support versions which the platform owner has deprecated.
I don't think anyone should fault them for making that hard decision.
It's possibly the case that Apple's lack of upgrade support is a feature, not a bug (though it introduces the complexity of eventual lack of security support).
Mavericks introduced RAM compression, so for RAM-constrained machines it may be even better than the previous OS.
It actually runs great. I'm using a 2011 Air w/2GB (cheapest back then) and El Capitan and it's almost as fast as my 24GB Mac Pro.
I push it a bit with Logic Pro X + drum samples (for my V-Drums), but it handles that without complaints. But for web, videos and programming there isn't much of a difference.
1) It's up to the user to decide whether a machine is usable for their needs or not, not Apple.
2) Locking users in at an older version and then refusing to support that version even just 3 years after it's come out is just too short a time window.
3) Offering no way for users who need an old version to get it except illegally is a non-starter for any purpose, security or not, again, because 3 years old is just not old enough to so completely phase it out.
While I agree that lack of usability is a concern, it seems to me that between lack of upgrade-ability, short OS version lifespans, and early phaseouts of old versions, Apple is intentionally forcing users to consistently upgrade once every 3-4 years at most. Fine business model, terrible for the end user, and a real detriment to Apple for me personally when the competition doesn't behave that way to that extent.
Well yes, but it is also a business decision. Further supporting an old machine with a changing toolchain means additional costs for development, testing and troubleshooting. Those are costs that Apple has to bear.
I won't contest your point that 3-4 years is too early, just saying that there's more to supporting old hardware than just including the same drivers as in the last release.