It's not just phones. Yesterday I tried to dust off a MacBook Air from 2012 so that the kids could play some games. It was used regularly up until 3 years ago, but now pretty much all software is broken, and it won't let me upgrade anything. Hopefully there's a Linux distro that will work on it.
Manjaro runs great on my MBP 2012. Or you can turn your MacBook Air into a "hackintosh" and install the latest macos on it using OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. Just be aware that recent version of macos relies heavily on hardware acceleration (video playback, cryptography, etc) and will fallback to CPU on older unsupported hardware, which is slow and deplete your battery fast.
I'm currently running KDE Neon on a MBP 2012, and I've installed linux on a few apple devices from that era. The nvidia drivers can be a struggle, and wifi drivers have to be configured manually.
