this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
648 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
78482 readers
1142 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Apple supports its devices for a lot longer than most OEMs after release (minimum 5 years since being available for sale from Apple, which might be 2 years of sales), but the impact of dropped support is much more pronounced, as you note. Apple usually announces obsolescence 2 years after support ends, too, and stop selling parts and repair manuals, except a few batteries supported to the 10 year mark. On the software/OS side, that usually means OS upgrades for 5-7 years, then 2 more years of security updates, for a total of 7-9 years of keeping a device reasonably up to date.
So if you're holding onto a 5-year-old laptop, Apple support tends to be much better than a 5-year-old laptop from a Windows OEM (especially with Windows 11 upgrade requirements failing to support some devices that were on sale at the time of Windows 11's release).
But if you've got a 10-year-old Apple laptop, it's harder to use normally than a 10-year-old Windows laptop.
Also, don't use the Apple store for software on your laptop. Use a reasonable package manager like homebrew that doesn't have the problems you describe. Or go find a mirror that hosts old MacOS packages and install it yourself.
Agree with both and able to do so cause I'm an IT professional and wo ked on all 4 major OSes in my past.
However, having to use an external package manager undercuts the advertising that they're just plug and play.