How is the OS Free? It's part of what you pay for.

I have a 11 year old PC -- running Cosmos now, and it's still faster than my hobbled M4 PRO with 48 GB, work mac with all it's corp spyware cruft on it.

We should expect more than 7 years out of all our tech hardware.

EDIT: I say this as a person who spent a couple weekends trying to get various forms of Linux running on a 2017 Macbook Pro, because it was stuck on VEntura.

In the bad (good?) old days Mac OS X cost money each upgrade.