Where I’ve seen these systems most in my work is connected to scientific instruments, where the manufacturer would rather you spend another half million dollars

Where I’ve seen these systems most in my work is connected to scientific instruments, where the manufacturer would rather you spend another half million dollars for a marginally improved model with more recent io and os support vs shipping a patch for the machine you already paid a quarter million for 15 years ago. The system being slow and old doesn’t matter. It is running xp and airgapped. Sometimes you access the data by usb stick or burning a cd rom. The software stack it runs mainly dumps sensor data onto a flat file so its not really necessary to be very robust. And sure the ancient optiplex desktop idling all day drinks more electricity than a modern light weight chip, but that couple dollars more a week if that in electricity costs is hardly a concern in research setting.