At least Apple does try a bit to be a responsible recycler and you can always take your old hardware to them.
At least Apple does try a bit to be a responsible recycler and you can always take your old hardware to them.
The sad thing is that newer macOS versions do still work really well on these unsupported machines - OpenCore Legacy Patcher proves it. All Apple would need to do is spend some time testing things, there's nothing to actually implement to make it work.
Isn't Apple supposed to be a services company now anyway, making money off of this installed base with cloud subscriptions?
I have a 11 year old PC -- running Cosmos now, and it's still faster than my hobbled M4 PRO with 48 GB, work mac with all it's corp spyware cruft on it.
We should expect more than 7 years out of all our tech hardware.
EDIT: I say this as a person who spent a couple weekends trying to get various forms of Linux running on a 2017 Macbook Pro, because it was stuck on VEntura.