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And 7-9 years is a fantastic support lifetime and yes, I know some folks who still use their 9 year old macbooks such as grandparents etc without major issue.

And 7-9 years is a fantastic support lifetime and yes, I know some folks who still use their 9 year old macbooks such as grandparents etc without major issue. You have new android phones that ship with software 1.5 years old and NEVER get updated.

rovr138 6y ago
I'm typing this on a 2011 MacBook Air. I don't use this as my daily driver, but I use for lightweight day to day things.
serf 6y ago
7 to 9 years is fantastic, but not really that out of the ordinary for this industry as far as I can tell? My 2011 model Lenovo came from the factory with a 2012 copy of Windows 8. Lenovo released BIOS and driver updates to the 2011 machine at the end of 2019 and continue to do so. Windows 8 is EOL in 2023 with free upgrade paths to 8.1 which has a further out EOL date, meaning that the OS is still supported by both companies, as well. Admittedly, however, your Android example is dead-on. Android seems to have always struggled with software updates; I blame version fragmentation along with very cheap (free in most cases) licensing costs, which spur on lower-quality vendors to take on the product.
andrea_sdl 6y ago
I agree but I'll tell you (as an apple fan in the ecosystem) that sometimes this kind of "let's abandon the old things" has some drawbacks. For example, the changes in the https behaviour and support for the websites, made an old mac useless because safari didn't support the new TLS versions and there weren't any decent alternative for an old system like that (we're talking about a 2004 mac if I recall correctly, intel 32bit, so yeah, I know it's old in many ways). The only solutions was to install linux and it worked. So, even though I'm fully committed to the ecosystem and I love each and every apple product I still do think that having to trash a machine after 10 years isn't so good considering that those machines are usually still capable to work daily.

rovr138 6y ago

I'm typing this on a 2011 MacBook Air. I don't use this as my daily driver, but I use for lightweight day to day things.

serf 6y ago

7 to 9 years is fantastic, but not really that out of the ordinary for this industry as far as I can tell? My 2011 model Lenovo came from the factory with a 2012 copy of Windows 8. Lenovo released BIOS and driver updates to the 2011 machine at the end of 2019 and continue to do so. Windows 8 is EOL in 2023 with free upgrade paths to 8.1 which has a further out EOL date, meaning that the OS is still supported by both companies, as well. Admittedly, however, your Android example is dead-on. Android seems to have always struggled with software updates; I blame version fragmentation along with very cheap (free in most cases) licensing costs, which spur on lower-quality vendors to take on the product.

andrea_sdl 6y ago

I agree but I'll tell you (as an apple fan in the ecosystem) that sometimes this kind of "let's abandon the old things" has some drawbacks. For example, the changes in the https behaviour and support for the websites, made an old mac useless because safari didn't support the new TLS versions and there weren't any decent alternative for an old system like that (we're talking about a 2004 mac if I recall correctly, intel 32bit, so yeah, I know it's old in many ways). The only solutions was to install linux and it worked. So, even though I'm fully committed to the ecosystem and I love each and every apple product I still do think that having to trash a machine after 10 years isn't so good considering that those machines are usually still capable to work daily.