It just never sweats AT ALL - it feels like a decade from obsolescence based on what I'm doing now.
It would have to be an order of magnitude faster for me to even notice at this point.
That doesn’t make it obsolete, at all.
And then there's 3rd party software that will stop supporting that old OS version, in part because Apple's dev tools make that difficult.
Eventually, Apple's own services will stop supporting that OS - no convenient iCloud support.
Finally, the root CA certs bundled with the OS will become too out of date to use.
I'm planning on putting Linux on my Intel Mac Mini soon. But when a M3+ Mini goes out of support, will we have that option?
With a debloated Windows 10 (which we're not going to connect to the internet anyway) they can live on for older games.
Your points are valid but it’s not 2 years, it’s more than that for big vulnerabilities.
Has it had one since macOS 26 came out? They usually do 2 versions behind - in the summer, that was macOS 13, but now it's macOS 14.
Edit: I know Mac OS X is a Unix and Linux is technically a clone, however, of the two, Linux & GNU is a much better environment to learn in.
15 years old is just old and has too little ram
A 15 year old device can be still as capable as a raspberry pi and those work fine now for modern computing
Just copy the LiveCD image onto a USB stick, insert, boot holding down the Option key, and you can try it without actually installing it (i.e. leaving your MacOS untouched).
Hopefully there will be some insight from what Asahi Linux is doing or has in store and what might be transferrable.
The additional cooling in them seems quite helpful to their performance compared to the same chip in a laptop.