I still own too many Macs that Apple arbitrarily decided I shouldn't be able to use anymore. As much as I'd like a new M mac, I wont buy one until I know I can run problem free linux on it when Apple decides it's time for me to upgrade again.
Like I was around for the whole 68k and PPC transition. Obviously the Intel transition too. I think the Intel was the worst, at least for us that doubled down on expensive G5s that barely had any shelf life to them.
Beyond that? Apple is pretty reasonable. Android Phones that were released at the same time as the XR, which still runs iOS 16, have been deprecated for almost 2.5 years in any kind of support.
I feel sorry for people that bought Intel Macs in 2019, as those are really the ones going to be left out in the cold.
Outside of that, as far as installing a brand new Apple OS on a 5 year old+ computer, is a crap shoot from the performance perspective. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. Maybe it will require too many concessions.
Intel's forever 14nm++++++ honestly sort of stagnated things for a while, but now they've taken off again, and you can often feel the age on those machines in a lot of use cases.
The old macbooks with the coreDuo CPUs, only lasted a few years before a next major osx release dropped 32bit cpu support.
I have a 2011 15" macbook pro that Apple ended the life of around 2015 or 2016, I believe, by discontinuing the GPU drivers in next major osx release.
How many releases do you think before x86 is dropped completely from OSX?