“WHY had Apple taken the unprecedented decision to make their latest OS update deliberately incompatible with Macs older than 2012?”

I suppose you missed all of the moaning and groaning this week about how Microsoft finally dropped support for Windows 7?

Regardless, backwards compatability only reaches so far. Your systems were supported by Apple and by software upgrades for eight years. To me, that’s kind of amazing.

And it’s hardly “unprecedented”, Apple’s annual software updates on the Mac and on iOS routinely drop support for older hardware. It’s not a new thing.

At some point in time you simply need to stop retrofitting your software to support old hardware and move on. All of those retrofits and back patches and shims make the software larger, harder to support and maintain, and dramatically increases the potential for bugs and as well as expanding the attack surface for people looking to penetrate the system.

And eventually, no matter how hard you try, you simply can’t make older systems behave like newer systems with more memory and faster processors and newer feature sets.

Or maybe you could. I mean, yeah, you could spent a boatload of money and time better spent on something else and attempt to emulate newer hardware features in software.

Of course, then articles start appearing about how Apple is obsoleting older hardware by “forcing” those system to run slower.

It’s a no-win scenario.

Switching topics, yes, some of the new “pro” systems are expensive. But not everyone needs a “pro” system and for many they’re overkill. I’m a professional Apple iOS developer and I just bought a $5,000 16" Apple MacBook Pro and you know what? I’m good with that. It’s my job and all of the i9 processor and 64GB RAM and 4 TB SSD upgrades are worth it to me.

But I’m not in the market for a Mac Pro, no matter how much I’d like one. A workstation class computer like that would be massive overkill for what I do and regardless of how much I’d like to see one sitting beside my desk.