I would argue that Steam and Homebrew users are relatively niche portions of the userbase, and that they would be more likely to own newer systems.
replyNeither statistic comes from a sample group that's more representative of the average user, who is mostly browsing the web and using a handful of undemanding applications, and is therefore less motivated to upgrade for performance reasons.
I'm not convinced either of those are substantially more niche than people who need to install the JDK
replyMaybe for Steam, but my gut instinct is that Homebrew would be the opposite: it would be disproportionately popular among devs who pride themselves on keeping hardware for many years longer than most people. "Yeah, this 2015 MBP isn't great for gaming anymore, but it's fine for running vim!" is absolutely the kind of thing I hear frequently.
replyI bought an Intel MBP towards the end. No regrets, I had valid reasons.
replyBut the MacOS support at this point is pretty atrocious. I mean, it technically runs, but the OS is clearly designed in a way that ruins performance on this hardware. It’ll run Vim, sure, for 2 hours on battery, hot as hell. At this point, Intel Macs are only fine for running Linux.