It works fine pushing 1440 or 4k, last I checked. I don't have it hooked up to a 4k monitor anymore, but I have no reason to believe that it would have stopped doing it. It does have a discreet GPU, and quite a bit of ram. Its not like 1080p content was pushing the limits of what a macbook could accomplish in 2014, so why would it choke now?
The new apple silicon is undeniably faster and more efficient, but the point is that there is, for most intents and purposes, nothing that the old machine can't run that a new one can (unpatched MacOS excepted, but OpenCore or Linux solves for that).
Again, I'm not saying that things haven't improved, just saying that a 10 year old computer is still a good machine, in a way that has never been true in the past of personal computing.
Compare a consumer computer from 1984, 1994, 2004, 2014 and 2024. The delta between each step is pretty massive up until the last 10 years.
The new apple silicon is undeniably faster and more efficient, but the point is that there is, for most intents and purposes, nothing that the old machine can't run that a new one can (unpatched MacOS excepted, but OpenCore or Linux solves for that).
Again, I'm not saying that things haven't improved, just saying that a 10 year old computer is still a good machine, in a way that has never been true in the past of personal computing.
Compare a consumer computer from 1984, 1994, 2004, 2014 and 2024. The delta between each step is pretty massive up until the last 10 years.