And before that, the intel variant supported something like six. But the bigger problem here is that macos doesn't support displayport MST, so even if you have the aggregate bandwidth available, you can't even do all of it through a single thunderbolt connection. You know what can? My 17" lg gram that costs less than half what my macbook went for, not to mention comes in at less than a quarter of the weight of my 16" macbook.

My home laptop was certified by the vendor for Linux and everything worked out of the box. Every time I've upgraded the OS, everything has worked. And it's still working 15 years later with zero fucking around.

My work laptop came with Linux pre installed and everything worked perfectly. If you're having problems with Linux these days you have a PEBKAC problem, such as buying a windows junkbox and expecting good things.

For those if us with shit to do it sounds like Linux is the minimum effort option too. No mucking work off brand hacky installers for an unsupported OS.

And also the vendor has better warranty options than Apple is able to offer too, because they don't hobble the hardware just so they can overcharge for storage/make machines go obsolete faster.

Windows 11 upgrade did not require me to do anything, OpenCore seemed way more complicated, a hacky non-starter.

It's way more complex than a Windows upgrade.

We had a 2011 MBP and had to have the motherboard replaced 7 times before Apple finally wanted to charge us $1200 for the 8th replacement. We sent it to a 3rd party to get "reballed", but that only worked for so long. We sued Apple in a class action with loads of other 2011 MBP owners and won. That's how we got the 2015 MBP.

>OpenCore Legacy Patcher

My geek card is doing just fine. I already know about OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I took one look at that and NOPED out of there. Sorry, I'm just not into the hacky shit that has to be done to get a perfectly good MBP to run the latest OS. I don't have the time for it.

10 year old Mac? No problem!

Funny how things have flipped around: a Linux user shaking his head at how mac users have to fuck with their machines, as opposed to Linux where it just works (tm). Are you guys made of time?

I don't think it will be updated anymore. It will probably go the way of Fat binaries or the Mac 68k emulator on PowerPC Macs.

Good for you. We had to ditch my wife's 2015 MBP (and went to Dell) after it wasn't able to be updated to the latest OS, and Photoshop and other applications she uses for her business couldn't be installed unless the latest OS was installed, which Apple no longer supported. Glad you aren't doing anything serious with your computer and you can let it limp along with an outdated OS. YMMV.

OpenCore Legacy Patcher is your friend if you have an out-of-support Intel Mac.

Models dating back to 2007 are supported, with limits of course.

Once Apple drops support for Intel, that will probably be the end of the line for running the current OS on older hardware.

Linux dropped support for 486 and early Pentium processors so it's not like Linux is innocent on this matter.

That's an bonkers false equivalence. The last official Linux LTS kernel support ends on December 2026. Last orders for the i486 were in 2007, so it's going to have had around 20 years of support after the last ones shipped. but that's missing something rather major.

And the 486 was a very special case, very much in the embedded and special purpose market. Sales of desktops had petered out long before that. The Pentium II ended production in 2003, consumer sales of 486 effectively ended some time in mid 90s. I as a teenager without much cash scored a second hand Pentium desktop in 1997 or 6. From a practical point of view for the kind of market Apple is in, we're talking nearly 30 years of support for 486 desktops and laptops, not 6.

Maybe abandoning hardware from five years ago is "too soon".

No maybe about it. My thinkpad W510 is my daily driver home machine. I have a GPU desktop for heavy ML stuff, but basically this old machine running of course the latest, fully patched OS and browser does just about everything else.

Thing is a 486 is not a usable general purpose machine today. A 10 year old Mac, never mind a 6 year old one very much is.

Linux dropped support for 486 and early Pentium processors so it's not like Linux is innocent on this matter.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/...

I don't know how long Apple, or other organizations that produce operating systems, should support hardware. Someone is certainly going to complain about seeing trusted hardware losing access to the latest software. I'd likely still be running classic video games on a Pentium II if a power surge had not killed it years ago. I ran that computer with the knowledge it would not likely run anything new, and I didn't need it to run anything new since I had other computers. I ran games on this old computer because it meant that I'd avoid odd behavior I've seen in emulators and other means to attempt to run older software I liked on newer hardware.

Maybe abandoning hardware from five years ago is "too soon". That's a matter of opinion, and of economics for a company driven by profit. Even nonprofit efforts like Linux has a breaking point on this, at some point people lose interest in maintaining support for old hardware with new software.

While supporting legacy hardware is extra work for Apple's macOS teams. Moving towards cutting an entire architecture out from most software vendor's support matrix is a huge benefit to them. For end-users, it was a good run and you can continue to run your old software on the old hardware. I do hope some applications will continue to receive security updates from their respective vendors, such as web browser.

I have. Unlike their Intel counterparts, even the overpriced models (which is admittedly all of them, so let's just say upper tier) only support two monitors, meaning you have to rely on shitty display link, which fucking sucks.

I used a 2012 model until just this year. That is a good 13 years.

I didn't upgrade because my 2012 unit wasn't supported. I upgraded solely for a bigger screen, from 13" to 16".

I think that's a lot more common than you think.

I still have and will use the 2012 unit, for various reasons and scenarios.