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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

If there are a large number of these machines out there then could it be a viable business model to provide third party OS support?

My parents rely on an Apple laptop that’s now ten years old. They would very happily pay to keep it ticking over especially to avoid the massive capital cost of a hardware upgrade. There must be many others in this position but I have no idea of “financially prudent, retired Apple laptop owner” is a market worth going after or not in comparison to how much it would cost to build a team of experts capable of supporting someone Apple’s software.

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Apple would be very unlikely to want or allow that (they make almost all their money on new hardware units sold, at least for macOS). OCLP will extend the lifespan of those Macs about as far as they’ll go with macOS (I.e. to the last version of Intel macOS that gets released in the next couple of years, plus however long Apple releases security patches for that release).

That might get you another 2 years if they pull the plug after Sequoia, it might get you another 3-4 if they keep supporting the 2023 Intel Macs that were sold.

After that, if the machines are still viable, I would think your best options are Windows or Linux anyway? (It’s hard to see where a custom OS fits in).

OCLP is great, but not parent-proof. I had to walk my mom over the phone through manually updating OCLP after she installed a macOS update without running the patcher first, which resulted in a machine with no working wifi. (OCLP did pop up a dialog letting her know she should update it, but she closed it without reading it as users typically do when given an unexpected random dialog)

It’s best to get ahead of these issues.

I don’t know if $759 counts as “massive” but you can get a refurbished M1 MacBook Air (warranty + AppleCare eligible) from Apple: https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac

Walmart sells a new MacBook Air M1 for $699: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39718716

I would rather install OpenCore and use the newer MacOS versions tbh.

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