Is that good? Windows 11 officially supports computers from 2017 too, Linux way further. Ubuntu 24.04 will happily run on machines over a decade old with no problems.
And Apple has poor backwards compatibility. You can't run 32-bit Intel binaries on anything newer than 10.14. PPC has been out of the question for over 15 years. Meanwhile even on Windows on Arm you can run stuff made with XP or even Windows 98 in mind.
> Windows 11 officially supports computers from 2017 too
... assuming they have TPM 2.0, which is far from a given.
> And Apple has poor backwards compatibility. You can't run 32-bit Intel binaries on anything newer than 10.14.
Fair point. Apple is indeed more aggressive on backwards compatibility in software... which is both a blessing and a curse. At the very least, it forces app developers to stay at least somewhat current, which means that Apple has far less legacy garbage to drag around - unlike Windows, where Microsoft went through at least half a dozen completely different programming frameworks and paradigms alone relating to "how to draw a window on the screen" which it has to support to this day simply because otherwise the complaints would be endless. And Linux is even worse in that regard.
> PPC has been out of the question for over 15 years. Meanwhile even on Windows on Arm you can run stuff made with XP or even Windows 98 in mind.
If you really have such old software and a need for it... run it on a VM.
MacOS Sonoma only supports a single model from 2017. The iMac Pro. Everything else is left out. Much easier to find a PC from 2017 that has support for TPM 2.0.
Software devs come and go, there's no guarantee the dev will go back and update old software. Just look at the graveyard of abandoned Mac games on Steam. And even if they do, it often means rebuying or worse a subscription just for the sake of running what you already had.
Can I run something like Crysis in VM with good performance? Especially on a completely different architecture like ARM?