My girlfriend has MacBook Pro from 2012 which has already been upgraded with more Ram and an SSD.
From what I understand, her OS (Catalina) has reached end of life in 2022 and doesn’t get any support from Apple anymore.
As that machine works perfectly, what should she do?
I hate Apple products (even if it’s painful for me to say that they’re good) and I’m a Linux enthusiast, so I’d tell her to install Fedora Asahi, but I wanted to know if the Apple enthusiast crowd had a better idea.
My girlfriend isn’t geeky at all (despite her geeky glasses) and she would want to stay in the safe environment provided by an Apple OS. But we also don’t want to replace that powerful machine as we hate programmed obsoletism.
I'm going to disagree with the OCLP people: it's a fine project, but it's absolutely horrible to deal with from an end-user perspective because they'll update something without realizing it's going to break something, and now you have to deal with someone's computer not working and get to maintain it.
If you can move to Linux, and she's happy with that, then great. Though you'd probably want normal Fedora, and not Asahi since it's not a M1/M2-based Mac.
But it sounds like she wants MacOS and, unless you want to fiddle with something that's finicky, failure-prone, and not guaranteed to work in the future, just go buy a used/refurbished M1 for like $600, and then not worry about it for the next 5-10 years.