Hacker News Reader

Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

But Apple does not support macOS for most Macs that long. E.g. last year's Mojave does not support iMacs from before 2012. You may be lucky and they might support the iMac Pro a bit longer, but it is unlikely that you'll get an up-to-date secure OS for ten years.

If they transition to ARM at some point, the lifetimes of Intel Macs may even be shorter.

View on HN

I did a quick check on Macbook Pros:

* 10.8 (2012) dropped support for original Core 2 Duo (2006) — 6 years

* 10.12 (2016) dropped support for 2009 MacBook Pro — 7 years

* 10.14 (2018) dropped support for 2011 MacBook Pro — 7 years

The releases in between didn't drop support for any (mbp) hardware.

The longest support I found with a spot-check was:

* 10.12 (2016) dropped support for 2007 MacBook Pro — 9 years

Apple tends to release updates for about 3 years for each OS. 10.11 (2015) got its last patch in 2018. 10.12 (2016) got an update in January and is expected to receive updates through September.

I should have looked up desktops, since that's what most of the discussion is in this thread, but I don't have much firsthand experience with them. So assuming you buy the hardware the day its released, you can expect to have the newest software support for 6-9 years and have security updates for 9-12 years.

I'm happily using Mojave on two MBP's - 2009 (4Gb) and 2010 (8Gb) with SSD's. Freedom to upgrade internals and the smarts and generosity of dosdude1 (google that) turned them into the best tech purchases Ive made (after previous years of throwing money at premium end PC's that didn't last)

Yeah, my "main" personal machine is a 2011 Air that no longer can run the latest OS. My 2006 Mac Pro got replaced on its 10th birthday with a new iMac as it was an OS or two behind. I'd say 8 years is sorta the outer limit.

To be fair, they support their computers for a long time and seemingly provide update as long as possible. My Late 2009 iMac still received 2017's High Sierra update.

and the reason it won't run Mohave is not caprice but rather a desire to simplify system graphics by moving it to the Metal API along with Metal's using hardware features not yet introduced in late 2009.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com