Because Apple will forcibly kill it after that with incompatible software updates. Windows machines keep going until they physically break.
But what everyone here is missing is that the consumer desktop/laptop market is dying itself. Soon it will only be for enterprise uses and gaming. Most people do all their computing through a phone or tablet. I know people who don't own a laptop.
This is demonstrably false. My wife continues to use my hand-me-down MacBook Air I bought in 2011. It was supported officially by the macOS until the most recent release, so she’s only one OS revision behind. I also recently retired a 2009 Mac Mini that I used 24/7 as a home server, only because the power supply failed. I used the G4 Mac I bought in 1999 as my daily driver (with some upgrades) until 2009.
A decade or more of use is an incredible value, and I’ve done that multiple times with my Macs. Few of my PCs have had a useful life approaching that length of time (the closest was an Atom machine I ran for 7 years).
That's interesting, as I just this month replaced the two kids' Dell 9020s with new PCs because the 9020s didn't support TPM 2.0, required by Windows 11.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-o...
"Most PCs that have shipped in the last 5 years are capable of running Trusted Platform Module version 2.0 (TPM 2.0). TPM 2.0 is required to run Windows 11, as an important building block for security-related features. TPM 2.0 is used in Windows 11 for a number of features, including Windows Hello for identity protection and BitLocker for data protection."
The 9 year old Dells were running just fine on Windows 10 (same as the 9 year old Air was on Catalina), but upgrading to the latest OS in both cases required a purchase.
That was the actual driver, though this thread is about OS vendors forcing changes in order to run the latest OS, which is why I focused on the Win11 TPM2 requirements and mentioned the 9 year old Air running a still-patched Catalina.
To the point of this sub-thread, it's still an OS vendor forcing a purchase to run the latest OS. 9 year old Macbook running Catalina and 9 year old Dell running Win10, both unable to update to the latest OS seems very close the same to me.
Maybe this is more of an indictment rather than a defense of Apple, but one machine I keep on an OS that's over 5 years old because it has the one version of Apple's Photos that didn't yet screw up the retouch tool. (And I use that tool exhaustively in retouching old family photos I scan in.)
Um, I have a 2012 MacBook Air (11"), that I use for my low-end testing, and as a Zoom host. Works fine. Runs lots of software.
It has to run Catalina (Mac OS 10.15), but Apple still pushes out security patches to it (I think we're up to 10.15.7).
I wonder if it was a recall. I didn't speak German that well back then so it might have gotten lost in translation. I recently also had issues with my Airpods Pro and they replaced for free, but they told me it was a recall.
It was covered outside the normal warranty because of the swelling issue. Mine swelled to the point where the trackpad was slightly unreliable.
which isn't good for Intel!
cpus are expensive to develop...
Most windows machines I had worked for around 3 years. 5 max.