"basically forever" is only true in Mac-land now because of the recent architectural switch.
Apple was dropping support for specific Intel microarchitectures with each release for a while there.
Now that the future is ARM, these machines will be supported for a long time. Not sure how long the Intel Macbook Pros from 2020 will be. I bet it's not another 8 years.
2016 is an important cutoff because it is when they introduced the T1 boot security chip. Some future macOS will drop support for everything before these machines, which will permanently evaporate the concept of a hackintosh.
Agreed. Right before your comment I pulled mac from the list. I was thinking of apple's iphone support being pretty good in the mobile arena and conflating that with their non-mobile support.
After double checking to see what's going on with old hardware, it became really clear that apple doesn't support their older laptops.
Apple was dropping support for specific Intel microarchitectures with each release for a while there.
Now that the future is ARM, these machines will be supported for a long time. Not sure how long the Intel Macbook Pros from 2020 will be. I bet it's not another 8 years.
2016 is an important cutoff because it is when they introduced the T1 boot security chip. Some future macOS will drop support for everything before these machines, which will permanently evaporate the concept of a hackintosh.