Judging by Apples track record for supporting iMacs, i don't see this as an issue. I owned a 2007 imac until 2014 and it was still getting updates. It was running the latest version of OSX until 10.11
This machine launched with, as i remember, tiger. There's machines barely newer that are literally still supported. How is a 9-10 year support window bad? You can't even do that consistently with windows(look at how many atom machines that were only 2-3 years old were cut off from windows 10, or recent updates therein)
And there's nothing stopping you from turning off the security controller and just installing linux, either. In 9 years almost all of the hardware will be well documented and old hat.
This could have a full 3-4 year or even longer life as a "pro" machine, then a long life as a backup/secondary machine, get donated to a nonprofit, or even as your parents cool looking desktop and be completely obsolete in a lot of senses before it will stop getting updates. This has been a proven track record over the past decade for apple.
And for clarification: i'm not shilling here or anything. I think they're screwing up a lot of stuff, and i refuse to buy one of the current macbook pros and am still riding along on the old style retina pro. But OS support is something they do a great job at. There's original-style silver keyboard macbook pros still supported on high sierra.
This machine launched with, as i remember, tiger. There's machines barely newer that are literally still supported. How is a 9-10 year support window bad? You can't even do that consistently with windows(look at how many atom machines that were only 2-3 years old were cut off from windows 10, or recent updates therein)
And there's nothing stopping you from turning off the security controller and just installing linux, either. In 9 years almost all of the hardware will be well documented and old hat.
This could have a full 3-4 year or even longer life as a "pro" machine, then a long life as a backup/secondary machine, get donated to a nonprofit, or even as your parents cool looking desktop and be completely obsolete in a lot of senses before it will stop getting updates. This has been a proven track record over the past decade for apple.
And for clarification: i'm not shilling here or anything. I think they're screwing up a lot of stuff, and i refuse to buy one of the current macbook pros and am still riding along on the old style retina pro. But OS support is something they do a great job at. There's original-style silver keyboard macbook pros still supported on high sierra.