Agreed. It takes more than a few developers to support older operating systems.

At my old job we supported only two versions of our software product, Tanzu Operations Manager versions 2.10.x and 3.0.y), and we cut new patch releases every few weeks (similar to Apple's cadence). Bumping dependencies was a pain. Well, usually it went fine, but sometimes you'd hit a gnarly incompatibility and you'd either pin a Ruby package to a known version or try to modify the code just enough to make it work without making a major change.

If I had to put a number to it, I'd say it cost us 2 developers to keep our older product line consistently patched, and our product was a modest Ruby app, much less complicated than an entire OS.

> new patch releases every few weeks (similar to Apple's cadence)

Is Apply really releasing new patched OS updates every few weeks?

my favorite Intel MacBook is from 2015

You act as if we should be thankful for 6 years of support when the hardware and sane support cycles easily exceed 10 years. And those aren't 6 years of security updates; they are 6 years of forced yearly feature upgrades and breaking things along the way.

What software are you talking about?

Who is forcing you to upgrade?

For that matter, what hardware?

I run an old Intel Mac and it’s perfectly reasonable for casual work. I’m not paying for stuff like Adobe leases though.

What exactly is an old Intel mac and what is a casual work?

For example, I have 2015 macbook pro. The last macos release for it is Monterey. Even brew has problems with that, erroring out when installing packages like libpng and complaining, that I should upgrade xcode cli tools. Which I can't.

Not on Macbook Airs that are only 3-5 years old though. We have a number that we plan on replacing after EOY, but we are still using for now. Can't get Sequoia.

> Macbook Airs that are only 3-5 years old

MacBook Airs from 2020 support Sequoia - so just the very upper limit of your range is relevant.

Absolutely not. Apple was still selling non-Retina Intel MacBook Airs until 2019. Those are now completely unsupported with no security updates having topped out at Monterrey. 5 years of updates on a new laptop is borderline criminal.

Not really suitable for a corporate environment but in case you weren't aware:

https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher

macOS Big Sur and newer on machines as old as 2007

macOS Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia

Nice. Yeah, never going to fly here :( pity

I see the Mac fanboys aren't happy with my factual statement. I love Macs (won't use anything else) but I also live in reality.