Wow, a 10 year old laptop? I use a 7 year old MBP 7,1 and it works 'fine' for starsector. It doesn't become unplayable with the normal settings.
The nice thing about OSX is it's actually a UNIX distro with a really well polished GUI. So you have access to the bash terminal with mostly normal BSD Unix commands, which computers have been using since the 1960s, so it's easy to find documentation and stackexchange threads on how to use the command line to do really complex, specific things, actually easier than it might be for windows. Also a lot of the Free Software Foundation, GNU, apps designed by scientists, open source stuff have an OSX binary or repository, where they might not even have a windows version-- but if you aren't fluent enough to live there all the time, you can fall back to that polished Apple GUI.
And Apple really did spend decades developing and honing the concept of the GUI, and writing guidelines for how they should be attentively designed and implemented, so that when developers follow these guidelines, the computer really is more intuitive and pleasurable to use in ways that it takes a while to notice but have concrete benefits (I've used windows a lot professionally and have had occasion to notice this). And the OS is designed for the specific hardware and if you fit within the user parameters it's a very slick and easy experience.
That said, Apple is often ignoring their own GUI guidelines these days, and their cheif designer, Sir Jonathan Ive has scoffed at the idea of "skeumorphism" i.e. that the appearance of interface elements should give some clue of what the #$@* they do, so Apple GUIs have become increasingly obtuse and minimalist lately. And many actual *nix distributions are increasingly user friendly now, and they are more secure, and Apple has this awful walled-garden thing that gets worse and worse all the time, and you wonder what other sort of weird backdoors they're putting in there, etc. And their newest laptops have no ports so if you use them for anything but posting to your instagram in an American starbucks, you will probably need an adapter. I'd say they peaked about 2010-2012.