Homebrew recently broke for me permanently on a macbook because it was made in 2013 and is now blocked from upgrading, so xcode no longer can be upgraded…Which means lots of other shit also no longer works. Including homebrew. Soon have to put a distro on it, I guess.
I was starting to get issues with a macbook from 2012 (specifically homebrew / xcode) when I upgraded. I’m going to be honest: Having a powerhouse of a machine for 10 years before it becomes obsolete, I’m not going to complain for one second. Got myself a new macbook, and it runs like the wind. Works seamlessly with all the tools I need in an environment where we rely on gfortran / gcc, and a lot of my coworkers use Linux.
To be fair: Part of the reason I waited for so long before upgrading was that I was waiting for them to ditch the butterfly keyboard / touchbar, and get some ports back into the machine. Once they did that I was sold. My only issue with macbooks would be the absurd price for an adequate amount of RAM, but as far as having a good computer, once it’s paid for it’s fantastic.
Open core legacy patcher has kept my 2012 MBP able to run modern versions of macos (currently on latest update to Monterey). No stability issues, but AirDrop is flakey and I am no longer able to run anything in a VM using Apple’s hypervisor. It runs well; might be worth looking into for your use case.