It's not a unique property of Macs. I've got the cheapest laptop I could buy in August 2001, a Toshiba that still runs...and runs fine with Wary Puppy or Win2k despite it's CopperMine 800mhz Celeron for many tasks. I've got a Dell workstation from 2008 that still has more cores than I can light up unless I try...and this Thinkpad, bought used, is 2010 vintage.
Computers tend not to go bad. Instead, jumping on the feature bandwagon that drives the product line model to profitability makes us feel that 800 million cycles per second is useless. In the early aughts, out in my garage I had bootlegged Windows Advanced Server running on a 40mhz 486DX2 with 8 megs of RAM full time to serve up the occasional file off the 340meg disk.
The article talked about current releases supporting old hardware, claiming MacOS support going to 2007 is impressive. I got Windows 10 running on a Pentium 4 from 2006, and Windows 10 hardware requirements are unchanged from Windows 8.1, and 8.1's requirements are little changed from 8 (the advertising says it's unchanged, but very old machines running 64-bit Windows 8 are demoted to 32-bit Windows 8.1), and Windows runs on impressively small and cheap computers like the Intel Compute Stick.
The big difference there is that Apple eliminated support for 32-bit CPUs and Intel GMA. Consequently, there is very little 64-bit software on Windows, but on Mac practically any application can take many GB of RAM.
Computers do go bad, though. I decided I'd ultimately retire that Pentium 4, because the cooler is becoming less effective. (Also, it can't play HD videos from YouTube and it consumes lots of watts for what it does and has always made a lot of noise.) The fan in my Toshiba laptop from 2005 broke and made lots of racket while overheating. The fan in my HP laptop from 2009 kept getting clogged and eventually stopped spinning. My PowerBook from 2005 just one day did not boot anymore.
heck, I still drag around an old 2005/06 era 8.9" netbook I picked up for $300. It's tiny, gets on the internet ok, can connect to an external monitor/kb/mouse to turn into an impromptu desktop in a pinch, has a 250GB HD and two SD card slot so I use it to offload photos from my sd card at the end of a shooting day while out traveling and the other slot lets me expand the storage if I need.
I can use it to review my photos from the day and do some minor edits with gimp.
Bonus, it's about fast enough to run dosbox or scummvm and play standard def movies in vlc well enough. I can even emulate a Sega Genesis and hook up a controller and use it as a mini console.
It's been around the world with me many times, fits into the space a large paperback book would take. It's not "modern" by any stretch, is pretty beat up, but the large cheap storage device that happens to be a computer is very hard to come by these days. I've seen some newer devices with better specs, but they all insist on tiny SSDs, like 32GB drives, so they're an instant no-go.
32GB with a couple different SD cards for different use cases would probably work well. They've got 256GB SD cards now, so you could even just get one for all your needs.
I miss my netbook, which was terrible by current standards, I made it work as a dev machine for a couple months while in-between workstations at home. It wasn't ideal, but it also wasn't as bad as I would have thought. I'm sure it would still see use if my son hadn't somehow destroyed the screen.
The 'unique property' that the article is about is the ability to run the latest, greatest OS. The PC equivalent would be running Win10 or a full-bloat latest distro like Suse and still be usable. The article isn't about systems that still work with antiquated functionality.
The Dell Workstation from 2008 [1] could run and probably will get loaded, eventually, with Windows 10. Currently, it's got XP Professional x64, Windows 8.1, Ubuntu Studio 15.04, and CentOS 6 and FreeDOS available at GRUB time...boots to Ubuntu by default. There's a Windows 7 VM, too just for grins. The Thinkpad GRUBs into Ubuntu 15.04 with Windows 7 as an option. It will also almost certainly get a Windows 10 upgrade over the next year, too.
[1]: To clarify, that's when I bought it. The model with Harpertown CPU's, etc. was available in Q4 2007.
I got 2002 700Mhz HP still kicking. I still use one thinkpad from 2007 with core 2 duo every now and then (not enough ram and too slow hdd for daily work, unfortunately).
Computers tend not to go bad. Instead, jumping on the feature bandwagon that drives the product line model to profitability makes us feel that 800 million cycles per second is useless. In the early aughts, out in my garage I had bootlegged Windows Advanced Server running on a 40mhz 486DX2 with 8 megs of RAM full time to serve up the occasional file off the 340meg disk.