Hacker News Reader

Comment by lizardactivist | Hacker News Reader

Sort of agrees with my own opinion, that your use of Macs and iPhones and your stay in the ecosystem is only secure as long as you keep paying up.

More specifically, you're good for a year after you do a major upgrade. After that you may or may not see critical issues addressed, and after two years all bets are off.

I'm not sure how long Apple supports their overly expensive things these days, but I will not be surprised if they at some point declare only 3 years of support from introduction. It would mean more money, and they know people will payup.

View on HN

The author glosses over the fact that you can upgrade to any new macOS version for free for around 7 years after your Mac was sold as new.

And even then there are ways to prolong the support window with projects like the OpenCore Legacy Patcher https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

So you buy a brand new Mac, you get to upgrade to the latest version and then even if you don't use OpenCore Legacy Patcher you're still getting at least some of the security updates from the latest version of macOS.

I realize that the author paints the picture of that later reduced level of support as being a bad thing, but they don't actually go as far as supporting their arguments with any sort of evidence beyond "there are bugs!"

Out of the box Apple is giving you ~10 years of at least partial updates and you can prolong it further using third party solutions like the OpenCore Legacy Patcher.

For example, you can use Monterey on the Mac Mini you bought in 2009, and the only way to go back to an older model is to start talking about Macs that are physically incapable of running modern macOS because they have physically incompatible 32-bit processors.

The iPhone 5s from 2013 just got a security update in July of this year.

But if you care about how long the vendor supports your phone, you really should get an Android phone. I’m sure you will be delighted about how long they support their phones.

The iPhone 5s got a security update to Safari. Android phones get updates to Chrome and the WebView component for many years past EOL as well.

> I’m sure you will be delighted about how long they support their phones.

Not generally. OnePlus only provides 3 major updates, for example. That's 3-4 years of use.

You can root for LineageOS or other custom ROMs, but then you lose Netflix and whatever because Android uses stupid trusted execution crap for DRM.

We really need a sarcasm bit for tcp/ip ;)

That’s nice. The article and most comments are about mac os. Snarky android comment is misplaced.

From the parent comment

> Sort of agrees with my own opinion, that your use of Macs and iPhones

I read that too. Parent went off topic for 1 word. Your entire comment is off topic. Do you have any thoughts on mac os you would like to share since that is the topic of the post?

Well, last time I checked, now Macs and iPhones are based on the same processor and many of the frameworks. Every time that Apple has done a processor change, it did drop the old ones faster.

Arm Macs are step change from x86. Given a choice between being on the Mac platform where Apple has moved fast to introduce better technology and being stuck on hot, loud, relatively slow battery hogging x86 PCs. I’ll take the former.

I don't know. I was a fan of what they were doing circa 2009-2014.

Big fan.

Haven't bought any computers since 2012 tho. And it looks to me like I am stuck with what I have, as what PC makers peddle is not meant for me.

If I was forced to, say for business reasons, to buy a bunch or even just one for the coming years, then in 2022 it would be Apple. Because they have memory and computing and bus on the same chip, and you can only beat that with a cluster. They even have a product that is a miniaturized computing cluster for a quarter of the price of one.

Apple is the greatest shit shoveler in PC-making right now. I'd go with Apple.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com