From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.advocacy

Tom Elam wrote:

There are even workarounds for updating the OS far past the last update Apple provided - just like Windows.

My officially unsupported 2017 HP Envy runs Windows 11 25H2 just fine,
but its slow hard drive makes means monthly updates are painfully slow.

I never disagree with anyone who makes a sensibly logically supportable statement, so I agree with Tom Elam that many times a PC will accept the
next release, so its full-support continues for another long cycle.

As an example, my 2009 box ran everything up to Windows 10, so that's about
16 years of full OS support, but it can't upgrade to Windows 11
unfortunately.

It seems most agree that the average full support for these Intel Mac
desktops seems to be about 7.26 years based on the numbers in this thread.

The best era seems to be 2007-2013 which is between 8 & 9 years.
The current era 2017-2019 seems to average only about 6.24 years.

As Tom noted, Windows is a different beast in many ways, one of which is
we'd go nuts trying to find full support for each hardware variant.

So we're stuck with full-support metrics for the OS software alone.

Windows 7
Released: 2009
End of support: 2020
~11 years

Windows 8.1
Released: 2013
End of support: 2023
~10 years

Windows 10
Released: 2015
End of support: 2025
~10 years

Windows 11
Released: 2021
End of support: TBD (likely 2031-2033)
Probably ~10-12 years

So Microsoft itself gives ~10-11 years of OS support but, it's longer than
that (and maybe shorter too) so it's less predictable in that older
machines often can run the newer versions but not always.

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