The last of these devices were sold in 2020. Eight years of full support is quite good (longest in the industry?), and usually you can keep using them for a good 2-3 years more, if you don't need the latest apps.
I have Debian Trixie on my Mid 2012, and it's much more responsive, lightweight, and easy on battery than OSX 10.14 (which i had been using until last year.)
As long as we can install linux on it, they can drop support. I don't care a single bit
- Not being able to install debian on M3/M4 has been the only thing that keeps me from retiring that machine, I'd rather keep changing broken components and batteries, because even though moving away from x86 is the right thing to do from an efficiency point of view, we don't have an open standard between manufacturers so their ARM chip, and every other ARM chip, are effectively a proprietary architecture in which the customer ultimately lose because he has no control on its own hardware
Yeah, that's post the controversy. Initially the vendors were expected to provide the updates... who obviously couldn't be arsed, so they set it to something around 1-3 yrs, which frequently went to 0 because the devices weren't sold quickly enough. That's from back when ChromeOS was initially put on the market, something around 2012-2015
Google thankfully relented and took up the maintenance burden, which ended with this policy
