Well, beginning of the end. It would be 3 years from whatever date they release a new version that locks it to a chip like this and drop support for old models without it. So lets say, 4-5 years. Actually, probably longer since they've been supporting old systems for as long as 8 years(2007 imac, others) with some macbook pros approaching 9-10 even.
How long you think it would take for them to do this depends on whether you really think they'd just decide to cut off a ton of machines at once and reverse course on really long support windows. And long windows really seems to be a roadmap, if you look at how the ipad 2 was supported as well.
I think they care more about "look at how we support our products!" than hackintoshes. What i could easily imagine though is way more features than just imessage and such being gate-kept into "only systems with our secure chip are allowed to run this"
I understand the security benefits but I can't help but just look at this as yet another piece of disposability on an already very "disposable" piece of 5K+ (starting) hardware.
How many iPhones are now in landfills because you couldn't downgrade the OS to an old version that would be usable.
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.
I agree with your main point about disposability. There shouldn’t be many iPhones in landfills, though. Apple recycles 100% of the materials, so as long as the old phone can be traded in or dropped off in an electronics bin, it won’t be wasted even though the owner will have been out the money by rebuying prematurely.
In that report, they list iPhone 6 disassembly recovery by kg/100k phones (search for Tungsten.) Cross-reference with the components by weight for the iPhone 6S (6 is not available; see https://www.apple.com/environment/reports/ for all reports.) Ignoring battery, screen and plastic leaves .063kg/phone, and according to that side bar, Liam recovers .033kg/phone or ~50%. Assuming Apple recycles most of the battery, screen and plastic, they are recovering ~75% of each 6S. That's pretty good, and it's good to know that the unrecoverable portions are staying out of the trash (and hopefully heat/vapor waste is mitigated), but it's years away from being close enough to 100% to round up.
How long you think it would take for them to do this depends on whether you really think they'd just decide to cut off a ton of machines at once and reverse course on really long support windows. And long windows really seems to be a roadmap, if you look at how the ipad 2 was supported as well.
I think they care more about "look at how we support our products!" than hackintoshes. What i could easily imagine though is way more features than just imessage and such being gate-kept into "only systems with our secure chip are allowed to run this"