There is no “hard stop” on the life time of a Mac. Yeah Apple will eventually stop updating the software but this has always been true. If anything this situation is much better that it ever has been with free OS updates.
Finally even if there was a hard stop Apple will gladly recycle your product. No need for it to go to a landfill.
The 2016 (first TouchBar year) is one of the shorter ones for newest-OS-support, only running up to macOS 12 (Monterey). That was released in 2021 and got its latest security update on 2023-06-21.
Going back further, the 2014 Macbook Pro supports macOS 11 (Big Sur), which was released in 2020 and also got a security update on 2023-06-21.
You have to go back to macOS 10.15 (Catalina) released in 2020 to find a version that hasn't had a security update this year. Which MBP models are stuck at Catalina? Mid 2012 to early 2013. That's 7-8 years with the newest OS, then another 2ish years of security updates.
10 years is far from perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than 6.
Windows is much better in that there aren’t yearly releases obsoleting machines every year. You can run the latest version of Windows 10 on hardware older than 10 years.
But for the first part, for a huge number of people all you need is a web browser and Microsoft office, which is supported on the 3 latest macOS versions, about the same window as the macOS security updates
Like I said it's not perfect but it's much better than 6 years
When you don’t patch out every serious known zero-day, there’s really no point patching any of them. The device is already compromised.
That means the updates are really only 6-7 years, with an arbitrary cessation.
There’s no reason that Apple should be stopping OS support for older devices unless there’s a compelling reason to do so.
Next year they’ll argue that macOS Whatever only supports Macs with secure enclaves to keep users safe, so that gives them a pass for 2024, but really it’s just continued forced obsolescence as they’ll carry on axing machines for no reason in 2025.
[ISL@home:~]$ lscpu | grep -i intel
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3330 CPU @ 3.00GHz
[ISL@home:~]$ uname -a
Linux home 6.1.0-6-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.15-1 (2023-03-05) x86_64 GNU/Linux
[ISL@home:~]$
It is a real bummer that the major hardware vendors choose not to open up their devices when they reach end of life. Phones and old hardware are frequently viable for double their enforced service-lives or longer.
I do kind of wonder if Linux’ real problem is just that the Venn diagram of things people care about is all over the place and Linux just fails at the edge cases.
I’ve used Linux for a bunch of projects, and use it every day in a VM for work, but I wouldn’t dare to use it for my daily driver and I don’t think my niche needs are ever likely to be something that gets picked up. Shame for me, but the nature of open-source.
macOS and Windows have a lot of features to lock user directories away from rogue software, and Macs have notarization and certificate revocation (which I believe is coming to Windows too unless I’m mistaken).
Notarization/revocation isn’t really philosophically FOSS compatible so I don’t ever see things like this making it’s way to Linux either.
I know it's possible, and I have a janky solution myself, but it really seems like iCloud is the only way to go without going through lots of hoops and still having a solution that's imperfect at best.
If you’re really careful not to enter any bank/credit card/personal information it’s probably fine to use an unsupported laptop, but then you’re having to consider how much you trust your own computer which you didn’t before.