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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

I wonder when they do the "5 years of security patches" thing phones did. Not sure why people accept that for phones but not computers, maybe Microsoft and Apple will realise that this will work on computers too soon?

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A larger portion of Microsoft's revenue is build around the business side where 5 years of security patches now buy a new device either wouldn't fly or wouldn't make sense. For home users the revenue is based around subscription services tied to using Windows (O365) not selling users on the Windows license itself which is now free assuming your device is new enough to work with subscription services that might be sold to you or the business you work for.

For Apple I'm honestly more surprised the MacBook lifecycle isn't shorter but it's also not their main money maker.

I have a 2015 MacBook Pro which is going to be the oldest-supported model for macOS 12 Monterey, so Apple seems to be supporting computers for ~7 years.

The mainline Linux kernel will also support pretty much anything you throw at it these days anyways. My 12 year old Thinkpad almost has complete feature parity with my perpetually upgraded desktop, which is a super nice basis to build my personal infrastructure off of.

Can you list examples where there is not currently feature parity?

Unlimited updates :)

macOS 11 still gets another two years of security updates though.

Apple is famous for not patching every security vulnerability on older versions.

https://twitter.com/grahamgilbert/status/1386862102942339073... is a public example, and I'm aware of non-public information regarding this as well.

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