this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2026
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Apple: discontinues hardware support after 3 years, makes you pay them again.
Outside maybe one specific model owing to the Intel-Apple Silicon transition, that is broadly not true. Apple generally supports hardware longer than its other composition (Linux notwithstanding, of course.)
They also go out of their way to make their devices more expensive for no real reason.
Apple doesn't use custom tech for those SSDs. They're still normal NVMe drives using the exact same controllers on the motherboard and the drive. They just rearranged the physical connector so you can't easily swap in a non-apple replacement (and save hundreds of dollars doing so).
This is a hill I will die on. Apple is anti-consumer, but they're cool so it's whatever apparently.
That's wholly incorrect.
Apple moved the controller to the SoC. The drives aren't NVMe drives, they're raw NAND carrier boards...
If that was the case,
Then the NVMe adapters that convert standard m.2 NVMe drives to the Apple SSD pinout wouldn't work. Things like this:
But they do, because the apple silicone is expecting to talk to an NVMe controller in the SSD with the same communications protocols.
Unless you've got some technical documentation to back that up?
Bruh... 2016-17. That's NOT Apple Silicon 🤦♂️
But it are still proprietary connectors that serve no purpose.
Even the latest x86 model released in 2019, got the 2026 Golden Gate release of macOS. That's 7 years of support.
Apple hate is so strong that even when it's not justified, people justify it. Of course, it's also sometimes justified.
My stepdad is still daily driving my old 2010 13" MacBook Pro and I have a 2012 Mac mini under my desk for when I need to test something on macOS. Those things are so old, they still had spinning HDDs when they came out. I replaced the HDDs with SSDs, added a bit more RAM and with OpenCore Legacy Patcher they both run macOS Sequoia (released in 2024) just fine and even with acceptable performance. Yes, the latest macOS drops Intel CPU support but that's still 14-16 years of that I got out of those machines and six years since the ARM-based Macs were introduced.
My phone is an iPhone 12 Mini which is almost six years old, still gets OS updates directly from Apple and apart from battery health being at 78% still runs exactly as on day one. I plan to use this thing until it falls apart, mainly because there is not a single phone smaller than 6" on the market.
And note that that MacBook and iPhone use non standard cables that don't match with any of the millions of universal accessories on the market and sitting around today.
And current MacBooks and iPhones wouldn't either if the EU hadn't forced Apple's hand. Software incompatibility is not the only way to force obscelance.
Not just hardware, software as well.
If Apple decides your software is "too old" even if it would still work perfectly, they say "too bad" and you will need to buy a new license.