"Homebrew's insistence on leaving OSes behind that they deem to be "too old" is becoming a problem as the years click by"
Indeed! I have a VERY usable Macbook Pro from 2015. Even with the newest version supported macOS version (11) Big Sur (which is still quite modern) it doesn't have any binaries for apps, which means it has to compile every single app and dependency.
I managed to update to macOS 14 (with the help of OpenCore Legacy Patcher).
But this just buys me one year to use Homebrew. Next year they will retire macOS 14.
And my machine is still very usable, but it will become junk from a developer perspective unless I have homebrew (or something similar).
It annoys me because I think this problem is fixable. Either community repos or more donations to homebrew to compile apps for older macs.
It's too bad that homebrew adopted the "Apple Attitude" around dealing with legacy OS versions. I don't recall ever seeing a message while working in Linux saying "Oh, you're using an OLD version of Linux, that's unsupported! You're a Tier-3 Loser and we don't guarantee this is going to work!"
Even developer tools on Windows tend to be fairly graceful about you running Windows 7 or whatever.
Somehow Apple and their entire ecosystem has adopted this "Latest Version Or GTFO" attitude towards users and developers.
How much are you willing to donate before concluding it's more efficient to just buy a new MacBook? Even the cheapest models now are faster, more energy efficient and more secure.
You don't have to throw the old one away if you can find a use case for running old software but I don't think there are many people running 'power user / developer' like tasks on old hardware, especially if their jobs depend on it.
Indeed! I have a VERY usable Macbook Pro from 2015. Even with the newest version supported macOS version (11) Big Sur (which is still quite modern) it doesn't have any binaries for apps, which means it has to compile every single app and dependency.
I managed to update to macOS 14 (with the help of OpenCore Legacy Patcher).
But this just buys me one year to use Homebrew. Next year they will retire macOS 14.
And my machine is still very usable, but it will become junk from a developer perspective unless I have homebrew (or something similar).
It annoys me because I think this problem is fixable. Either community repos or more donations to homebrew to compile apps for older macs.