Except Apple has already been found guilty of throttling old devices to try to force users to upgrade. They’ve been doing this for a long time, but they’ve only been ordered to pay a settlement in recent years for doing it with their iPhones.
But honestly the older Macbook Airs don’t need to be throttled, they just need the old universal dongles to crap out, IIRC those things were useless without the dongle to connect all your peripherals .
Just more proof that we live in a simulation and the character creation system has a finite number of facial combinations and ends up repeating often. /s