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Comment by IMTDb | Hacker News Reader

This is comparable to Apple timeline. The iPhone 6, released sept 2014 got a security update earlier this year.

comparable to the iOS stuff at least. I was a bit frustrated to find out that a 2015 MBP I had in a closet has been out of support for a while (I have very high doubts that there was any technical reason for the line drawing on that front).

I really appreciate the iOS support window but it's messed up that their laptops ad desktops (which can last _so long_ and be useful!) just fall out of support despite still being very capable machines.

The kicker of course is I at least updated it all to MacOS 12 to give to a friend and everything still ran extremely well. But at one point these machines will stop working for purely incidental reasons

Well, the phones haven’t been through an architecture change recently, while the laptops and desktops have.

I think you’ll be safe on ARM macs for 10 full years.

but the i7s are still there, and still getting updates.

I get that there's a legit question of having 2015 MBPs lying around, but honestly just having a switch to let you install it feels legit. It's not like the hardware is changing that much over the years, and they have to have the OS support a bunch of hardware configurations anyways

Metal is one of the reasons the 2015 macs were dropped from support: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102894

We put Mint on a free iMac from ~2010 and it works great.

> I was a bit frustrated to find out that a 2015 MBP I had in a closet has been out of support for a while (I have very high doubts that there was any technical reason for the line drawing on that front).

They’re talking about security updates. Your definition of support seems to be “latest bells and whistles with a major release.”

Your 2015 MBP was eligible for a Safari security update released last month and a macOS security update the month before[0].

This means your 2015 MBP receives similar support as the iPhone they mentioned.

We can argue if seven years of the “latest and greatest” is sufficient for a laptop before it is relegated to just security updates, but I don’t understand the lament.

It’s a capable machine, as you said, and it still ran great. If the manufacturer gives you all that was advertised at purchase and then some and then ensures it’s safe to use while not receiving new bells and whistles, how is that a demerit that causes frustration on your end?

Forgot the link.

0: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222

Not truly "out of support for a while" -- it was fully supported right up until a couple months ago.

I was worried that Apple was going to discontinue support for my early-2015 13" MBP after their new Mac announcements in the late Oct 2023 event, so I took it to the Apple Store in Sept and had them replace the battery which had been needing service for a while.

It's stuck on macOS 12 Monterey, but got a macOS security update in Oct (possibly its last) and a Safari update just over a week ago.

Security updates aren’t the same as major version updates.

The iPhone 6 is stuck on iOS 12 and has missed out on 5 major iOS versions. It launched with iOS 8, so it only got upgrade support for four versions of iOS.

it's limited to ios12 though, and crucially also safari 12 because of that, which limits its usefulness. so while it getting security updates is great, it does have a limitation an android getting security but not OS upgrades would not have. Though of course most android manufacturers are far worse than apple even if we just look at full os upgrade timeline.

imo it's better than apple. With apple you are pretty limited with apps after end of life. With android, the play store is more decoupled from the system, more apps to install even if not on the latest version. You can also sideload. But still, it's nice we have this

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