I recently bought a new MacBook, my previous one having lasted me for over 10 years. The big thing that pushed me to finally upgrade wasn’t hardware (which as far as I could tell had no major issues), it was the fact that it couldn’t run latest macOS, and software support for the old version it could run was increasingly going away.

The battery and keyboard had been replaced, but (AFAIK) the logic board was still the original

which is very annoying, as none of the newer OS versions has anything that warrants dumping hardware to buy brand new to run them with! With the exception of security upgrades, which i find dubious for a company to stop creating (as they would need to do so for their newer OS versions just as well, so the cost of maintaining security patches ought to not be much, if at all), it is definitely more likely to be a dark-pattern to force hardware upgrades.

As long as there are enough users of some hardware, free software will support it, because the users of that hardware want it to.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250425084216.3913608-1-mingo@...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wicfBCyMj_x5BiL32o55jqXfn...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wjCiEk-kc-vOug2GKJdhHKce3...

Also he said that software from third parties also don’t support the older OS so even if Apple did provide security updates, he would still be in the same place.

The screen on the MacBookPro10,2 is 2560x1600 which is still higher than a lot of brand new laptops. The latest version it will run is 10.15 from 2019. I know Apple switched to ARM but most people don't need a new faster computer. I stopped buying Apple computers because I want my computer supported more than 6 years.

I do have 3 newer computers but these old Macbooks are kept at various relative's houses for when I visit and wnat my own Linux machine. They have no problems running a web browser and watching videos so why replace them?

That statement absolutely needs a source. Is "usage" 100% load 24/7? What is the failure rate after 7 years? Are the failures unrepairable, i.e. not just a broken fan?

I think it was about 15 years back they stopped saying that. Once we passed the 28nm mark it started to become apparent that they couldnt really state that.

It makes sense, as parts get smaller they will get more fragile from general usage.

With your GPUs yeah they are probably still fine but they could already be half way through their life time, you wouldnt know it until failure point. Add in the silicon lotto and it gets more complicated.

I design chips in modern tech nodes (currently using 2nm). What we get feom the fab is a statistical model of device failure modes. Aging is one of them. When transistors gradually age they get slower sue to increased threshold voltage. This eventually causes failure at a point where timing is tight. When will it happen varies greatly sue to initial conditions, exact conditions the chip was in(temp, vdd, number of on-off cycles, even the workload). After an agong failure the chip will still work if the clock freq is reduced. There are aging monitors on-chip sometimes which try to catch it early and scale down the clock.

There are catastrophic failures too, like gate insulator breakdown, electromigration or mechanical failures of IO interconnect. The last one is orders of magnitude more likely than anything else these days.

For graphics, the same defect could be severe enough to completely render the GPU useless.

By 'Modern' they must mean latest generation, so we'll have to wait and see. I was imagining not using an RTX 5090 for 7 years and find it doesn't work, or one used 24x7 for 3 years then failing.

Though, it can be solved with redundancy at the cost of performance.

The silicon gates in GPUs just don’t wear out like that, not at that timescale. The only thing that sort of does is SSDs (and that’s a write limit, which has existed for decades, not a new thing).

since electromigration is basically a matter of long, high-current interconnect, I guess I have been assuming it's merely designed around. By, for instance, having hundreds of power and ground pins, implying quite a robust on-chip distribution mesh, rather than a few high-current runs.

But it someone is running an LLM 24 hours a day, might not go for as long.

We are flying blind, both on those claiming short life span and those who are not.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=gpu+lifespan&ia=web

You'll need to scroll past the ones talking about obsolescence versus failure. Toss in 'data center' if you like.

You'll see a range of numbers -- including some lower than I cited -- but it's all in that ballpark.

I seriously doubt this is true. The venerable GTX 1060 came out 9 years ago, and still sees fairly widespread use based on the Steam hardware survey. According to you, many (most?) of those cards should have given out years ago.

what is the age-related failure mode you're referring to?

or are you merely referring to warranty period? (which has more to do with support costs, like firmware - not expected failures.)

This is absolutely ridiculous. Even if Taiwan sank today we really don't need those fabs for anything critical. i strongly suspect we could operate the entire supply chain actually necessary for human life with just z80s or some equivalent.