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Does Apple slow down old Mac Minis too? It seems to get worse after each OS update.

• grzm 9y ago
  Every† OS update includes new features: they're generally not just bug fixes. These new features will generally increase the amount of work the machine needs to do, and often is made feasible by the availability of the new hardware. If the older machine doesn't have the same power as newer hardware, it will likely be slower: it's doing more work. Anyone developing a system needs to make a choice: allow the new feature to run on older hardware and accept that it may be slower, or don't allow it to run. They also need to make tradeoffs in what feature sets they make available to platforms (e.g., version-x-for-platform-a, version-x-for-platform-b). Each additional version/platform configuration is additional work to maintain. You may disagree with the choices they make, but they do have to make these choices depending on where they want to distribute their resources as a company. If the underlying assumption is that Apple is doing this on purpose to make machines obsolete, I think that's mistaken. If OS updates make an older machine run slower, that happens because the update includes new features which requires more resources, and older machines may not have as many resources available. † At least major versions, and most minor versions.