This is a sore spot for me. I have been a graphic designer on a Mac since 1998 - and have owned a good number of Macs and other Apple products in that time - and so have our kids. I think in my home right now I have 5 bootable Macs (one is a Special Edition iMac and another a G5 Power Mac tower) plus three more in my office which are used daily. When we moved to Maryland in 2012, I literally threw in the county dump a bootable G4 Power Mac tower. The retired Macs are partly due to the hardware no longer supporting the operating system. In the office right now is a Mac tower from 2005 which runs perfectly everyday but can not upgrade beyond El Capitan. The 2005 Mac is essentially a file server and has a robust back-up system, but it also runs AccountEdge Pro, my accounting software. I have been warned by AccountEdge NOT to upgrade to Catalina, as they do not, and never will support Catalina. So, I limp along. That 2005 computer also occasionally boots up to an external drive which has Leopard 10.5 and Adobe GoLive - I use that to edit a couple really old web sites for small clients (plus my web site at anvilgraphics.com). I was so ****** when Adobe purchased GoLive, only to discontinue it in favor of the less friendly Dreamweaver.
In late 2019 I had to buy a newer computer in order to run the Adobe Suite, which is my bread and butter. Don't get me wrong, I really like the newer computer and the faster processors and such - but I am dead tired of Apple (and Adobe) relentlessly forcing new equipment and software on us. It is expensive to maintain all this stuff. Frankly, since the introduction of the black paint can Power Mac, Apple has not made a computer really fit for my situation as a smaller graphic designer - not everyone wants to drop $4000 plus on a computer, only to do it again in a few years.
On my wife's computer we do have a couple applications which don't run in Catalina, and they are important to us. Hopefully those developers will provide an update in the future, but in the mean time we need to stay put.
So anyhow, I have been up and down this roller coaster for a long time, and would love to buy all new Apple products at every introduction, but that is just now feasible. By the way, I have boxes and drawers full of Apple cables and adapters going all the way back to serial connectors. I could write a whole nother note about that mess.
