Comment by zarzavat

There are ways to patch around arbitrary "unsupported" status. What tends to reduce the real support time is the hardware itself (e.g. non-Metal supporting GPUs). However, M series SoC are likely to have support for a very long time. It's not like the Intel days when the underlying hardware was changing drastically from generation to generation with a multitude of CPUs and GPUs that all had to be supported in the OS. Apple has a dozen SoCs to support in Mac OS and that's it.

As such, if you buy a M5 MacBook Air today you are very likely to get software support that lasts until the laptop is physically falling apart.