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"last forever" is an overstatement, the lastest macOS only supports device until 2017: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213264 ; That is only 6 years old, that is around the phone support period around a later pixel phone, which is not even a company that focus on sustainability.
Although you can probably throw linux on it to extend its life, but I dont know if it is as easy as install it on a normal laptop.
On Intel Macs, Linux is pretty easy to install. A lot of people put a lot of work into having most Macs just work out of the box on Linux.
On Apple Silicon, most of that work is still unfinished. Asahi Linux is the main project to get Linux on M1/M2, and the goal is to upstream everything, but it's a long road.
Either way, the sheer popularity of Macs basically guarantees a usable experience on Linux. It's just going to take a bit for Apple Silicon to catch up.
Also, I think "last forever" with Macs is more about the hardware itself. It's hard to deny the build quality is really good (except the keyboard from 2016-2020 on MBPs), and I've seen people using 2011 MBAs stuck on Catalina as their daily drivers because the hardware just keeps working.
Point of clarification, that's only for upgrading the OS, not for security patches. Those go back further, with a recent example covering 10-year-old models.
You're right. They're official timelines aren't super duper long. But it's still longer than any other laptop I've ever owned. I'm not supporting Apple here. I'm just acknowledging their laptops last a very long time. To the point where most people are going to upgrade out of the laptop before it breaks on them. That at least that's my personal experience
I am confused, it seems like two of macOS's competitor: windows and linux, all have much longer support period than apple.
I am using a surface laptop 2 which is almost 5 years old, and given that there is no major version of windows planned, it is hard to imagine that it will become unsupported in 2 years.
Granted many people unnecessarily update their hardware, simply because "new one is better", which is honestly a quiet disappointing trend for me. From my personal experience, apple product buyer seems to have a higher tendency to engage in this trend, for reason unclear to me.
The major difference is Windows and Linux are not as tightly coupled as Mac OS. You can have a Windows laptop which gets updates to Windows operating system even though the hardware is no longer getting driver updates. So if there's a known security issue in your Bluetooth driver for example, nothing will get patched. And you will continue going forward blissfully unaware that you're exposed to a major security vulnerability because Windows itself is not responsible for your Bluetooth driver. And the same for Linux. Just because it can run on the hardware doesn't mean the ecosystem is being maintained.
Apples is the extreme other end of the spectrum. Everything on the computer is being maintained by Apple every piece of hardware is getting hardware updates from Apple, and they're integrated into the operating system. So because of that Apple's providing stronger guarantees if you're within the support window. If you fall out of the support window you can still hack the Mac to run the new versions of Mac OS, and you can still run the old versions of Mac OS without updates.
So it's down to the business guarantees that you're being given by the ecosystem. Apple gives very strong guarantees for a very long period of time.
Windows gives weak guarantees for a very very long period of time, and strong guarantees almost never. Unless you're buying directly from Microsoft and even then they're not guaranteeing hardware updates for every piece of hardware in the system.
And Linux gives no guarantees for hardware