That’s useful if you’re not averse to MacOS. Given that Apple now deploys backdoors by default for their own apps which will always inevitably result in exploits, and turning their back on decades of computing history with no “legacy” < 64bit support, I find myself struggling with that choice.
Heck, my 2015 MBP is still running Mojave (and thankfully still receiving software updates)
The removing of 32bit support in Catalina was definitely a bad thing for many, who are using x86-Macs, but for someone interesting in an ARM-based Mac, shouldn't play a role.
Until it does. Some future MacOS may need support of some new architecture feature, then it'll be "better buy an Arm13 mac if you want to run MacOS 2023!". Apple doesn't have a very good track record about supporting their own old hardware in new MacOS releases. Several iMacs and MacMinis come to mind. Their past behaviour sets a benchmark for their future behaviour, and since there are no reliable assurances about their support roadmap, I'd think carefully...
What? Big Sur supports hardware that is at least 7 years old. Catalina goes back to 2012 (and still gets security updates). For an OS vendor that has yearly updates, they do a pretty good job of supporting older hardware.
True. It looks like the last PPC Macs were released in 2005 and were available through 2006 [1]. The last OS that supported them was Leopard, which got Security updates though 2009 [2].
Even better: Based on apples history High Sierra probably EOLs January 2021 and supports hardware all the way back to 2010. So that's a decade of hardware support which is pretty good.
> Given that Apple now deploys backdoors by default for their own apps which will always inevitably result in exploits
You're talking about the certificate revocation check that bypasses VPNs? That one is to prevent malware from being able to hijack and block certificate checks.
Heck, my 2015 MBP is still running Mojave (and thankfully still receiving software updates)