The blog post reminded me of my last laptop upgrade (Macbook Air) as well. I was perfectly happy with the old laptop, nothing wrong with the hardware for me, bu

The blog post reminded me of my last laptop upgrade (Macbook Air) as well. I was perfectly happy with the old laptop, nothing wrong with the hardware for me, but software releases started depending on new OSes and then I couldn't install those any longer. No "graceful degradation", and as far as I could tell the limitation was just the size of the storage drive for the OS in particular — not the nature of the chip itself or drivers or anything like that. I don't necessarily attribute anything nefarious to anything, but collectively the whole thing seems like madness to me. What's ironic is I bet if I put linux on that machine, it (a) would be totally feasible to install recent versions, and (b) all the latest versions of the software I needed would be there for those versions. It seems like there needs to be some principled way of maintaining installs on older hardware... or I guess I just have to weigh this issue more heavily in my decision making about OSes in the future.