That’s not how it works. The cost to maintaining support for old hardware isn’t merely money for more engineers. It’s the opportunity cost of slowing down forward progress for new things.

Intel laptops are sooooo slow. So extremely painfully slow. They’re quite bad. I’m largely a windows users, but my god old Intel laptops are bloody awful. Leaving behind old and bad things isn’t bad.

Besides, an older Intel MacBook will continue to work in its current form. It doesn’t need another 10 years of updates.

They really aren't slow, but the performance and battery life is greatly eclipsed by Apple ARM. I could live pretty comfortably on a Lenovo P51 (something like a 2017 MBP) if I had to under Linux and FreeBSD. Also a not negligible amount of performance was lost by the security gaffes and microcode and OS mitigations for them.

> opportunity cost of slowing down forward progress for new things.

Which ones and how?

If they're too slow to your liking, then upgrade. But for many people the performance is acceptable.

If they’re acceptable then keep using them as is.

If that's the case, Apple could easily offer a fantastic trade-in deal on existing Intel machines (say, bought in the last 5 years), to get people moved to Apple Silicon. Do you think they can't afford it? I feel bad for the person buying an Intel Mac Mini in 2022.

Apple could afford to randomly select ten thousand people via lottery and give them a million dollars. Most American HN commenters could afford to donate 80% of their salary and still live a comfortable life. And a lot I bet could donate 90%.

A person or company being able to afford something is not a compelling argument.

I know, but Apple offers trade-in credit anyway when you "sell" your old laptop back to them. Offering an additional credit as good will to recent Intel owners would do nothing but help their reputation and get old systems off the street. It doesn't effect me... I migrated to Apple Silicon years ago.

It’s just a simple value prop. Is the cost of increasing the payout worth the brand reputation?

Well we can say with confidence what Apple determined the answer to be. Only a few dorks on HN will care that a 5 year old laptop won’t get the new macOS update.

5 years is admittedly a bit short. But the M1 was a quite frankly revolutionary upgrade. So it’s a one off.