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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

> Nanometer-scale nodes wear out much more quickly. Modern GPUs have a rated lifespan in the 3-7 year range, depending on usage.

I recently bought a new MacBook, my previous one having lasted me for over 10 years. The big thing that pushed me to finally upgrade wasn’t hardware (which as far as I could tell had no major issues), it was the fact that it couldn’t run latest macOS, and software support for the old version it could run was increasingly going away.

The battery and keyboard had been replaced, but (AFAIK) the logic board was still the original

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> it couldn’t run latest macOS, and software support for the old version it could run was increasingly going away.

which is very annoying, as none of the newer OS versions has anything that warrants dumping hardware to buy brand new to run them with! With the exception of security upgrades, which i find dubious for a company to stop creating (as they would need to do so for their newer OS versions just as well, so the cost of maintaining security patches ought to not be much, if at all), it is definitely more likely to be a dark-pattern to force hardware upgrades.

That's not just a dark pattern, it's the logical conclusion to Apple's entire business model. It's what you get for relying on the proprietary OS supplied by a hardware manufacturer. It's why Asahi Linux is so important.

And then he still couldn’t use the third party software he says he depends on…

I'm not sure I agree. Open source software also regularly drops support for old hardware and OSes.

"regularly" is doing a lot of work here. When Linux drops hardware support, we are talking about ancient hardware. An example of a regular drop: Linux 6.15 just a month ago dropped support for 486 (from 1989)!

Pretty much, you can still get modern distros that support 32bit PowerPC.

That's surprising. What is the 486 missing that Linux needs? Or is it that there are no volunteers to test and maintain Linux on a 486 (as often happens with older architectures)?

It needs a bunch of compatibility code and the maintainers felt it wasn't worth the effort of taking care of that anymore:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250425084216.3913608-1-mingo@...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wicfBCyMj_x5BiL32o55jqXfn...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wjCiEk-kc-vOug2GKJdhHKce3...

Open source software drops hardware support only when there are nobody left who volunteers to support that hardware. When does this happen? It happens when there are not enough users left of that hardware.

As long as there are enough users of some hardware, free software will support it, because the users of that hardware want it to.

Is "regularly" every 2-4 years, or longer? What are your options? With Apple you have none. It's really not a comparable situation.

You mean besides the fact that they completely transitioned to a new processors and some of the new features use hardware that is only available on their ARM chips?

Also he said that software from third parties also don’t support the older OS so even if Apple did provide security updates, he would still be in the same place.

Depending on how much has changed in the interval, backporting security fixes can be completely trivial, very difficult, or anywhere in between. There may not even be a fix to backport, as not all vulnerabilities are still present in the latest release.

I've got 3 Macbooks from 2008, 2012, and 2013. Apple dropped MacOS support years ago. They all run the latest Fedora Linux version with no problems.

The screen on the MacBookPro10,2 is 2560x1600 which is still higher than a lot of brand new laptops. The latest version it will run is 10.15 from 2019. I know Apple switched to ARM but most people don't need a new faster computer. I stopped buying Apple computers because I want my computer supported more than 6 years.

I do have 3 newer computers but these old Macbooks are kept at various relative's houses for when I visit and wnat my own Linux machine. They have no problems running a web browser and watching videos so why replace them?

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