I don't think it's fair to expect Apple to support 32-bit processors anymore. OS X will run on Core2Duo, which is nearly 10 years old. My parents' iMac is a 2006 and runs El Cap.
I also have a 64-bit Core 2 Duo that Apple no longer supports. OS X Lion was the last release for the 2007 MacBook 3,1.
I would also say that Microsoft's End-Of-Life security update promises mean a lot less now that they've demonstrated willingness to subvert that system to force-upgrade people.
they are actively pro-consumerism they are actively pro-waste
they actively don't care about your slighly older product. you are advocating holding them to a lesser standard of culpability and support than M$ and I find it ridiculous.
There's a palpable issue here. One shouldn't try to deny it.
It might not be fair to expect it, but it's absolutely fair to count it against how Apple supports their customers.
Computers have slowed down. Basic support for for 10 years is not a crazy idea.
[0] https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-grou... [1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/226520/Apple_Explains_White_i... [2] iPhone 6S available 25 September 2015, iPhone SE available 31 March 2016
Might not have been measurable, and might just cost an extra engineer without really harming anything.
If they had gone 64-bit-only, I'd be much more in agreement with you. But if you're still supporting a 32 bit platform, you have a lot of restrictions put on you, and the marginal cost of keeping support for a second 32 bit platform is not a big deal.
At minimum, slow systems require gracefully degrading GUI, which increases complexity by an order of magnitude. The graphics card capabilities are a much better first approximation than the word width.
If it took just a few extra engineers, or a few thousand, to fix the bugs that they have, Apple would have done it. The Mythical Man-Month, and all that.
This isn't even close to what he said, and it only makes sense if you have an extremely reductive black-and-white view of the world. There are places on the spectrum between "perfect support" and "absolute shit support", and the phrase "count against" simply implies that supporting decade old hardware is a notch higher than the same support setup without that advantage.