At least for me, one of the reasons I buy Apple hardware (e.g. iPhones) is that they’re supported longer than the competition. So I think if Apple are doing the above then it’s short-term thinking.
My Dad bought an 5K iMac in 2017. He just used it for browsing, email and YouTube etc. It works well. Very fast. Fantastic screen. Doesn’t support the new OS coming out in a few months (but presumably will still get security updates to its existing OS for a few years). There is no reason to fill our landfills with powerful machines like that! (I would say I regret telling him to buy a Mac, but Windows 10 will stop getting security updates in a few years too.)
Unfortunately, at the time, I needed to run legacy programs and apple just left a lot behind.
I’ve had old tablets and windows installations stop working (as well as macs and ios) for that reason. A new Firefox installations on Windows and Mac got the web working for a while more.
I find it interesting that the primary factor seems to be if it was easy to maintain support. IIUC there is no public promise of software support lifetime. I wonder if there is an internal minimum, then they continue supporting as long as it is easy to do so?
I bought the original Intel MacBook in 2006, and the last OS update was in 2011 so that wasn't bad. By that time it was already pretty slow due to the limited CPU and memory. That was much longer than you'd expect the Windows equivalent laptop from 2006 to last.
The Core 2 architecture with 64bit support was released in late 2006, and the MacBook updated the same year - less than 6 months after release of the first, so two architectural changes in one year! It's strange Apple didn't just hold off from the initial release for a while.
Apple might well have reduced their turnover by making the M1 series too good to need replacing on the same timeframes as the Intel machines - either way, what’s the point of making hardware built to last without the software?
I would say I'm a "power user" and the Touch Bar was the most anti "power user" move Apple has ever made. The first iterations with no physical escape key were atrocious. Then they gave in and brought back the escape key while still keeping the Touch Bar. I've had it on about a half dozen work machines at this point and I'm so sick of it you couldn't pay me to own one as a personal machine. I'm so glad it's finally going away and you can get machines without. The Touch Bar is a prime example of a solution in search of a problem.
Until recently I had three Common Lisp environments: LispWorks Professional, SBCL, and CCL. When I (mostly) retired I stopped paying for LispWorks and now CCL is off the table also.
I hope you have better luck than I did with CCL’s cocoa IDE and GUI library. I only write the simplest of GUIs. However, CCL is great for development because of fast compilation times and for some reason, file IO is so much faster than SBCL.
