Also, that sounds like a bug not forced obsolescence, apple just doesn't allow new MacOSes to be installed on hardware old enough unless you hack around it.
It gets nobody anywhere, it's contradicted by a 20-year period of generally very reliable and long-lasting hardware from Apple, and additionally, it's lazy and uninformative.
Forced obsolescence is the deliberate undermining of a device to ensure that it cannot be used in the future. That would be if Apple intentionally included code in Big Sur to cause older MacBooks to mysteriously brick.
There is a big difference between intentionally writing code like this versus not performing adequate Q&A to ensure that such bug doesn't exist, and only the former of these qualifies as planned obsolescence.
Every upgrade since 10.10 has had a NOTICEABLE slow down on my MacBook Air 2013, and my 2012 Mac Mini, and more recently my MBP 2017 is showing signs of slow down and reduced battery life as well with each update. They can even be point updates, not major ones.
These happen man, and I can’t see the real benefits that I’ve gotten from say 10.10 -> 10.15 that would outvalue the degradation in performance I’ve seen. Ok you say, a MBA 2013 is ready for the pasture, but a maxed out (RAM, SSD) MBP that is 3 years old is really just entering midlife.
It’s not a random mistake.
History is not on Apple's side here.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/technology/apple-iphone-l...
[2] https://fortune.com/2020/02/07/apple-iphone-slowdown-update-...
That's the opposite of "forced obsolescence". And it's not even a close call. The stupid, credulous media coverage of this issue was embarrassing.
It's also a good idea to clean install all major (annual) versions of Apple OS's. When you install one major version over another, the upgrade script has to try to convert the configurations for most system services to the format for the new OS version and the possible combinations of settings in those configurations is virtually unlimited. A lot of post-upgrade issues and sluggishness result from non-optimal conversion of those configurations, especially on iOS. If you back up everything and format the drive before installing the new OS, everything will work much better. Yes it takes extra time to do that, but you will save many multiples of that time over the next year because your machine will run faster and have fewer issues.
What am I paying the Apple tax for?
Maybe check if the cooling is clogged or the cpu is force throttling because some temp sensor is not working. Run apple diagnostic for that.
MacOS has a bunch of bugs (for me) and they have terrible QA as it seems, but I don't see planned obsolescence here.
However, I was able to buy new batteries from apple for my non-unibody mac even after its update cycle is ended.
I can still buy aftermarket batteries for it and it works well. I might install something else on it in the future but, it's far from useless and dead.
The throttling sometimes happens because of a bad temp sensor / connection. Sometimes it's the charging port as well
More likely as someone in the thread pointed out, this is probably a bug related to some kind of defect or damage in the system's io board. Perhaps a certain revision of said board is a problem. Some suggest that something the upgrade does 'damages the board' .. perhaps through some kind of firmware update, but that story isn't so clear yet.
Maybe they could make that clear for anyone buying an Intel based mac since we all know they are switching over to ARM CPUs. They won't though, they will still be selling Intel Macs for some time, knowing that they won't be supporting those macs through the useful lifetime of the hardware.