[rmi_]

While Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 completely, Apple is just stopping feature upgrades. Apple usually supports old OS versions for years to come, especially when it's the only supported version for a lot of devices. So no, Intel Macs don't need to be retired.

[rollcat]

It's surprising enough that you can still get a few things done with a 2002 PowerBook G4: <https://www.rollc.at/posts/2024-07-02-tibook/>

The most painful parts are (1) it's a bit hot and loud under load; (2) you need to patch modern software like git, likely with little hope to upstream; (3) waiting hours for those "simple" things to compile - which, in the end, tells us something important about what we'd consider "simple" nowadays.

For both retro and previous-generation hardware, security is the most important concern. Patches for PowerPC kept coming until 2011 or so (that's almost 10 years after that particular machine was released). I'd expect the Intel Macs to keep getting official patches until 2030, and in the meantime I wouldn't be surprised to find community efforts to extend that. "Sorbet Leopard" was a thing for PPC Macs, the Hackintosh community is much stronger than back then.

[philistine]

> the Hackintosh community is much stronger than back then

Yeah but they'll be stuck on macOS 26. That's effectively the planned end of that community, they're not interested in running old versions of macOS on PCs.

[concinds]

Only for security vulnerabilities that "Apple is aware may have been actively exploited". And almost never for any bug fixes (and sadly, Apple now tends to push off bug fixes to the next major release/"n+1" rather than fix bugs in the major version in which they were introduced).

[JumpCrisscross]

> Only for security vulnerabilities that "Apple is aware may have been actively exploited"

That still leaves a perfectly adequate machine for most common uses.

[jurmous]

They also support updating Safari for 2 versions back of macOS.