Wow! That’s disappointing, I never had issues updating the OS either but now I’m worried since rolling back is so painful.
Extremely disappointing that a machine with decent hardware gets sanctioned to be trash when it’s still useful to do 95% of daily activities. This stuff needs to be enshrined in law…
That is not 'out of support', what I linked to explains what is and isn't out of support, how the categories work, what the retirement schedule looks like, and so on.
Any machine which isn't out of support will continue to receive security updates for the last version of the operating system which it does support, for a minimum period of ten years for Macs.
To reiterate, a 2016 Mac is still under support, which means both that Apple will repair the hardware for a price, and that the operating system it's able to run is also still being supported.
It isn't the latest OS, trying to gloss this as a lack of support is misleading.
I disagree. For example when we build software, if we choose to build upon third party software with a regular release schedule, we often have the choice of upgrading to an LTS release or the latest stable. The LTS doesn’t have all the new features of the latest stable, but it still accepts bug reports and receives security patches. That S in LTS stands for Support, and I don’t think that’s unwarranted.
Similarly, if your Mac can’t run the latest MacOS but Apple is still shipping you security updates and will still help you at the Genius Bar, that’s what I’d call supported.
That's actually good news I wasn't aware of. I have a couple Macs (a MacBook and an iMac) that I mostly just use for browsing. As long as they get security updates I'm pretty well set.
I probably will replace the iMac with a Mac Mini at some point but this means there's no rush.
And even after they go out of official support there are people who figure out how to run the latest or at least later software on them, depending on what you use them for.
And of course, with the Intel ones you could install Linux or even Windows.
Mostly just browsing. All my multimedia, code stuff, and other essentials are on an M1 MacBook. I could probably run nothing but a browser if I wanted to clean up the systems. So basically I can keep running them for a long time. They're fine for their current purpose.
