My dad has a Mac Mini. I believe it’s a 2012; if not it’s a 2014. It seems (not there, can’t verify 100%) that he might be running into things like root certificate issues with his browsers. He currently uses Firefox, but he’s running into “we don’t support Firefox” sorts of issues with websites he needs to be able to use.
It looks like Chrome, Brave, etc. won’t run current versions on that OS.
So he likely needs to upgrade. And we can’t switch from macOS. He’s not good with OS-level change.
If I took my 2018 Mac Mini up there and swapped it out (Sequoia 15.7.3), I realize it wouldn’t be “current” - but as of right now, it’s only about a year out of date. Anybody want to hazard a guess as to how long it would be usable with browsers like Chrome? Would he get 4 or 5 more good years out of it before he had to upgrade again?
IMO: That really depends on what he does with his Mac. Sequoia will probably be supported for another year, possibly a bit longer. And it might get a couple of security updates after that. Currently Google Chrome still supports Ventura.
Web browsing and MS Office. And he doesn’t even need to share the Office stuff with anybody. He just uses Excel for tracking business stuff and Word when he needs to type something out.
He’s quite literally only running into issues because websites are starting to not work properly.
Given that 2018 means it has an Intel Chip, and Intel OS support stops this year on macOS 27. I’d suggest a couple of years before numbers get so low that Browser builders stop supporting them.
According to this website, Sequoia and below is at about 11%, as new Macs come aboard, and those (like me) who have been holding off jump from Sequoia to 27 on Apple Silicon macs, within 2 years the number of people running Sequoia or lower will be in the low single digits and the number of those running 3rd party browsers will be miniscule.
I once continued to use 12 Windows XP machines after MS dropped support. But they only ran one program that verified data prior to it being uploaded to a server. And none of the PCs had internet access. I don’t connect to the internet with any unsupported computer.
But if I did, I would not do any banking or e-commerce. I wouldn’t log into any website, and I would run a good quality antivirus with active scanning. YMMV.
I definitely appreciate where you’re coming from. That said, he’s still using the 2012 Mac Mini and doesn’t see any issue with that other than “why won’t my bank website work?” So any improvement is an improvement.
I had this same issue with my parents. Older Mac system that did everything they wanted until their Credit Union updated the website and did not support the older version of Safari. Other browsers were a temporary fix at best.
I have a 2018 Mac Mini and while it cannot update the OS any longer, I expect it to be viable for another 3-5 years. If you could find an M2 Mac Mini used somewhere that might be a longer term option.
If I thought I could get another 3-5 years, it might be worth swapping it in for his. An M2 with 16 GB looks like it’s going for $650-$700 used. At that point it might just make more sense to buy new.
Although I’m wondering for somebody in his case if 8 GB might be fine. Normally I wouldn’t even consider it…but I think he’s running on 4 right now.
My father uses a 2007 iMac and my mother uses a 2009 MBP (with SSD upgrade). They started having problems with websites not working in old Chrome or Firefox. I installed Chromium Legacy on their machines and most sites work again. Unfortunately the last updates to Chromium Legacy were last year, so no idea what the future of the project is.
