Maybe it was easy for you to modify your OS to continue updating, or you downloaded some ISO of Catalina someone else pre-hacked for you - but it was certainly a non-trivial effort for whoever figured out how to trick the OS into installing and/or updating.
It just seems like wasted effort, since the company all this supports really has made it clear they do not want you to have this ability, and can at any moment make future updates break everything all over again, leading to a new effort to reverse engineer the changes.
So I don't agree, and I will use the car analogy again - old cars are not "supported" in any way and yet many people keep them going. There's serious engineering effort to make the parts, to write new software, to improve existing firmware etc.
By your logic, that's also "wasted" effort since the manufacturer chooses to abandon cars after just few years, so why would you keep them going.
I feel the same way about computers - like, who gives a damn what apple thinks. I have a laptop that is still going because people keep making it compatible. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
The difference there is you're not violating some TOS or EULA by replacing parts on your classic car, and when you change your oil (do OS updates) there's no chance of suddenly your transmission refusing to allow you to shift gears until you perform more heroics and disable the artificial limitations.
Very few non-classic and/or popular cars receive massive aftermarket support for all parts - often the aftermarket supports parts that are in common with a lot of vehicles or are vehicle-agnostic (such as belts, etc), and in some cases you're plain SOL (try replacing an airbag on a 1993 Dodge Caravan, for example - all you can find are OEM used ones pulled from junkers).
I think your comparison would be more apt if, say, Ford disabled all vehicles that were 10 years + 1 day old. While Apple isn't disabling your OS, they leave you exposed without security patches, etc... - making it approximately the same.
>The difference there is you're not violating some TOS or EULA by replacing parts on your classic car, and when you change your oil (do OS updates) there's no chance of suddenly your transmission refusing to allow you to shift gears until you perform more heroics and disable the artificial limitations.
How long do we have to wait for the early Teslas to be considered "classics", because they're doing worse than this already...
"Self driving? No, that was only licensed to the original purchaser, you need to pay us $8000 now because we just remote disabled it when we worked out you bought this Roadster second hand. Hope that helps, have a nice day - Elon"
It just seems like wasted effort, since the company all this supports really has made it clear they do not want you to have this ability, and can at any moment make future updates break everything all over again, leading to a new effort to reverse engineer the changes.