macOS very clearly is not designed to be long-term, legacy software, sitting on a machine for a decade like old servers did. That's just not the model they have. It’s not what they’re offering. I don't know why you'd attempt it therefore.
"It's just the Apple way" has been used to defend just about everything at this point.
Unclear support terms and unsupported software for machines that were sold brand new at retail just a couple of years ago at premium prices is just plain wrong.
EDIT: I've changed "a few months" to "a couple of years" as I can't find the link that explains which of the languished SKUs was still being sold on the Apple.com site as new shortly before being axed in Ventura. It also doesn't include refurb Macs or those that are still in retail channels which would make the support life even shorter from new.
This is a far cry from Windows 10 to Windows 11, where blocking old machines (while still allowing a workaround) due to genuine security enhancements was met with uproar. Thankfully no T2 Macs have been dropped yet but I suspect despite having great hardware and being perfectly capable (and supporting enclave security and encryption hardware), they'll be axed unceremoniously in a couple of years anyway.
When I do software for macOS I know that the culture is I don't have to test on 10 old versions that people might be running. It's reasonable in macOS to just say 'you obviously have to be running the latest version' which simplifies so much, and allows me to get on with more of what matters.
Sure enough, every time we cut off an old device or OS, we'd get customers complaining and giving bad reviews. But then, Mr. Apple Culture guy would look at the dashboard and say "See? Nobody is using that version anymore!" No shit, it's because we cut it off and those users bailed on us, genius.
Backwards compatibility is one of the greatest services you can give to your customer. Cutting off support for old versions simply because you're too lazy to maintain that support is just telling those customers to fuck off and find a competitor. The code simplifications/savings that you get from dropping old versions are seldom worth that. They often amount to one or two more lines with an if() statement.
It is interesting to look at what changes between releases, which is why blog posts like this get attention but it’s not a problem report - notice how there isn’t anyone saying something like “I took an external drive and it didn’t work on my 2013 Mac?”
Lol so what is the problem? Why would you bin it?
Apple's offer after two years is a lot less than the quarter of the retail price that was mentioned by parent and will probably be much worse still by the time they deprecate them. Just not as attractive an option as parent made it seem, at least for me if I wanted to get rid of it.
When people "why is this still a thing?" sometimes it sounds like they're asking "why do I have to make trade-offs at all?" which really doesn't make any sense.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but how did you conclude that? Not from the marketing ("And one more thing; we're not going to support this long-term!" — to rapturous applause), not from their specs, website, release notes, or anything like that.
No, my guess is you read between the lines that Apple is a disposable-consumer-product company. Of course they'd never admit this, and _that's_ the problem here.
It is not unreasonable to expect long-term support for software, and brushing that under the carpet with "ah well, you know what Apple's like", just gives them license to never have to _admit_ what they are.
I know this, so I update immediately, and get on with it. If you do something else then you're just denying reality.
> It is not unreasonable to expect long-term support for software
It is unreasonable to expect that, if that is not what has ever been promised to you or delivered in practice.
And you never will. Part of my point was that they want all the benefits of saying they're not going to provide long-term support, with none of the downsides of saying it. Hence you _know_ this to be true, but can't find it written down.
> I know this, so I update immediately, and get on with it. If you do something else then you're just denying reality.
"My boss treats me like badly / my internet service is poor / none of the software I paid for works two years from now / [any other endless examples of being treated like a shmuck]. I know this, and just get on with it. If you do something else then you're just denying reality"
> It is unreasonable to expect that, if that is not what has ever been promised to you or delivered in practice.
I don't need to be explicitly promised reasonable terms to find the way I'm being treated unreasonable. "Well, we never _said_ it would still work in a few years" is not going to cut it.
People, we used to have standards. Some of you are too young to remember — and I do _not_ mean to sound condescending, it's just true that some of you weren't around back then — but people had expectations of products, and they were high (in comparison to today). You bought things for life. We've been frog-boiled through iterations by companies like Apple to accept throwaway culture.
Evidence from version numbers of APFS, a critical sub-system in macOS, is entirely consistent with Apple’s claimed support policy, of only fully maintaining the current version of macOS, and only providing security updates to superseded macOS for two years after that.
You can see this in the lack of any functionality for such a simple task as window tiling.
Power users should decamp, rapidly, to Vivaldi + Linux Distro.
It also has more complete and consistent keyboard shortcuts than most of the alternatives since that’s been part of the HIG for decades.
Similarly, I do most of my window management using the keyboard so I’m skeptical that you’ve done enough research to speak so authoritatively, or considered that possibly power users might have more than a relatively minor feature factoring in to such a big decision.
Window tiling on fully DEs on linux are not very good. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Cinammon don't have very good window tiling, either. They're very basic and tend to mimic Windows. The automatic tiling WMs lack even very basic functionality, like a login manager, a status bar, a clock, or volume controls, so I don't see how that's acceptable when compared to MacOS.