New macOS historically runs on devices between 5 and 10 years old. Longest in recent memory was El Cap which supported 8-10 year old devices. Shortest was Snow Leopard, which supported 3 year old devices.

Ventura is lower, 4-5 years, but that happens periodically when aligned with major architectural changes.

[edit] Honestly, their support cycle is pretty impressive. And just because they don't release a newer version of macOS doesn't mean software stops working.

Why should 4-5 years be lauded? I daily-drive an AthlonXP machine from 2008. Nothing about the hardware requires dropping support. (Linux has, sadly but understandably, dropped support for the older 386/486/ppro architectures in the name of kernel sanity, but I wouldn't run a desktop with any of those anyway.)

Dropping support for hardware that still runs perfectly fine, and isn't a heinous mess of architectural workarounds, is nothing more than a crass money-grab. Which is completely understandable for a company whose job is to make money, but I still don't see why that's praiseworthy.

It's one thing for the Linux kernel to still support 15+ year-old hardware (the Athlon XP was already pretty old by 2008). It's a very different thing for a full desktop OS to still support it in a feature-complete way.

Historically, Apple seems to prefer to drop support for old hardware rather than maintain a long list of caveats about which features cannot run on older machines. Throughout the Intel Mac era, Apple was clearly trying to raise the bar for baseline GPU performance to ensure the graphical effects really would run "perfectly fine" as you put it, though they were stymied by some of Intel's anti-competitive behavior. Their decision to drop support for the 32-bit kernel and firmware was quite reasonable, though the later decision to drop support for 32-bit applications was more of a problem for users.

> I daily-drive an AthlonXP machine from 2008. Nothing about the hardware requires dropping support.

Does Windows 11 work on that machine? Does Windows 10?

I've run into this a few times with Apple. It's not that the upgrade is explicitly not allowed by policy. It's just that things are broken in ways which prevent you upgrading/using the device properly. I don't know if it's just lack of care on Apple's part, incompetence, honest mistakes or a stealth method of forcing an upgrade. In any case, hardware that seemed slow and outdated with Apple's software ecosystem now runs perfectly with Ubuntu. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I suspect it's more that maintaining a 10+ year testing matrix across three architectures and like 15 product families is pretty un-manageable.

I've had a similar experience, where supported OS updates rendered a macbook effectively unusable due to performance hits and bugs.

It's one of several reasons that I stopped buying macs for my personal dev machine and switched to ubuntu. Linux certainly isn't perfect but updates have been more pleasant than on mac or windows.

I have a 2013 MacBook Air that got the latest updates up until recently. Over 7 years of updates. That’s really incredible in my view.

Right, and they also do security releases for some older macOS and iOS releases, so even if your machine doesn't support the lates version, you can still have a secure machine. E.g., a few days ago they also put out security fixes for macOS 11 and 12, in January for iOS 12 (supporting iPhones 5s from 2013).

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222