I have a Macbook Pro 2015 and the latest OS it supports officially is Monterey. The new Ventura (2022) is not supported anymore. I consider my device to have had software support for about at least seven years so far and until when they stop releasing security fixes for Monterey. I believe this to be sufficient for my needs and the frequency of which I upgrade the laptop.
P.S. I don’t think that it’s ok for Apple to stop supporting older devices. I am just pointing out my personal view concerning my needs.
I wish apple would do 'best effort' support on older macs. Meaning, it'll let you install after you click thru two pages of warnings, and might work, or might not.
Apple ships all drivers with OS. So, if Apple drops hardware support, it removes drivers and other support for not supported hardware. For example for Ventura they dropped support for Nvidia GPU-s, Metal is built now to require AVX2 and much more. "Best effort" support is not trivial in such cases. Yes, I know about OCLP and use it myself, but it's a hack.
But it isn’t the way Apple does things. They obviously don’t want Apple computers in the wild running a version of an Apple OS that might or might not work.
P.S. I don’t think that it’s ok for Apple to stop supporting older devices. I am just pointing out my personal view concerning my needs.