So I’ve only somewhat recently got into the Apple ecosystem, but I can tell you that once a macOS version loses support it’s technically on death row but nowhere near as dramatic as you mention.
I recently daily drove a Mac running macOS Catalina (2019) and I was surprised that it still ran everything I needed for my IT degree (Zoom, Office 365 suite, VSCode, Signal, Tailscale, etc.) and the only real issue I noticed was Apple’s Xcode not being compatible.
I also own a Mac mini 2012 with i5/8GB, and while I don’t use it often, my parents daily drive that as a smart TV and web browsing machine with no real issues at all. The last official version of macOS on it was Catalina, but I used community patches to push it up to Monterey (2021) and it’s totally fine.
I think when you own and actually use a Mac, you will find in its own way, that they do last longer than Windows equivalents. I have a 2012 Latitude with i5/8GB and yes I could run the latest Win10 natively (but not Win11 without hacks) but I don’t think it exactly cuts the mustard anymore, and I think most people who would use it would generally agree. Given its age I would just Linux it up if I wanted to daily drive it.
Are homicides up in the rest of the developed world among youths? I feel that here in Australia, while we have our own fair share of domestic issues, it doesn’t seem anywhere near as widespread that Aussie youths murders/homicides are higher than say, 10 or 20 years ago.
I don’t have any sources for that, I am writing this up five minutes before I go to sleep, but I think it’s a potential talking point, and if data does corroborate with my hunches on this, maybe it’s not the social media alone and maybe something USA does differently? Maybe the lax gun control?
Easier to manage for IT would certainly be my bet, and appealing cheap contracts. Even those Acer Aspires so many schools used were double the price of these Chromebooks, so suddenly youre talking about nearly halving a ~$100k cost. Schools want things locked down and enslaved, they couldn’t care less that they are Linux under the hood. They don’t think like you and I.
I want to abandon the shit platform but its just so nice like in my lunch breaks at work or just after work, whack on some YouTube, and I can watch gaming, I can watch tech, I can watch really niche tech, I can watch people fixing cars, I can watch an Aussie dude fuck around with his nuggets, like these people are genuinely interesting and make genuinely good content, but there’s no decentralized or otherwise separate YouTube-like platform they upload to elsewhere.
Sure, Nebula has thought provoking videos, Floatplane has a few, Odysee has a few more but there’ll be that niche YouTuber who does videos on vintage Macs that I’m in the mood for, and back onto YouTube I go.
It’s scarily difficult to get off it. I want to, and maybe I will if things get so shit it’s borderline unusable, but I think Google knows how to boil the frog and unfortunately that’s the reality of it all.
I envy you not having YouTube as something you don’t use often. YouTube was genuinely at least a decent platform over 10 years ago when I joined it, and I’ve been hooked on it since, every single shit change they make.
This isn’t the first time they’ve had an ad supported Office for free. Anyone remember Office 2010 Starter, that shipped with only Word and Excel and also had a permanent ad banner.