That's not how macs work. You don't suddenly lose the ability to run new binaries just because they're not on the latest MacOS version.
replyUsing your own conservative estimate, 8 years seems like a fine lifespan for a laptop, far longer than the "few years" you initially said. And in practice, there are plenty of macbooks that have been running even longer.
The parent commenter described exactly how Macs work. I have a beautiful 10-core iMac 27” with 72 GB of RAM from 2020 that Apple has now decided to turn into a lemon. macOS Tahoe runs as slow as molasses and no more macOS upgrades will be forthcoming. I downgraded to Sonoma (which cost me hours) and the machine runs well again for now but the App Store has already started refusing to update apps like Pages because macOS is old. Soon I won’t be able to install a single app through the App Store and Linux (T2 Linux in my case, not Asahi) will be the only option to keep using this terrific hardware.
replyIntel macs suddenly will lose the ability to run programs because Apple has dropped the requirement to ship an intel build. And from experience, as soon as Apple stops requiring devs support old hardware, nothing works anymore.
replyThat only affects new software, the stuff that runs on those macs now will continue to run on them in the future
replyWhich will make it 7 years old. That is hardly a machine that must be replaced “every few years”
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