[crazygringo]

There's a good argument to be made that Apple devices are not luxury goods but save you money in the long run.

They often last for many more years than competitors' products, receive upgrades for longer, become obsolete less quickly, and Apple will repair them both under warranty and out of warranty. (Many competitors simply do not service their products.) And when you're finally done with your device, you can often still resell it on eBay and get even further value from it, again often for much more than with competitors' products of the same age.

Apple products on the lower end tend to be fantastic investments actually. And given how much we're working from home now, your primary devices for remote communication are hardly "luxury" and more "essential".

[thecupisblue]

You reminded me of the last time I spent money on a laptop before mac. Well, it wasn't me, it was my parents. For half the price of new mac air, I got a Toshiba budget notebook. It barely lasted 2 years, which was the amount it's "anything happens" warranty expired - which wasn't really anything happens. The CD ROM just didnt slide back in totally one day and stuck. The shift key got so fucked up I had to disable it preboot or I'd be stuck with caps. Fun times. Never again. Made me appreciate macs way more when I got one.

[benhurmarcel]

And I used a Dell XPS for 8 years. Not only Macs have good quality.

[fraudsyndrome]

Similar story although I haven't purchased a macbook yet. Used to purchase laptops within the 500AUD range which would break or die within a year, decided to spend 1000AUD on a Asus zenbook and it's held up quite nicely over 3 years - only issue being the battery but that's expected.

Haven't spent anything close to a MBP but I know people still using the 2015 model and holding up nicely. I guess price sort of correlates to build quality? Although same can't be said for resale value.

[kyleee]

I still quite happily daily drive (in reality, every other day or so) a 2011 MBA upgraded to 4 gigs of ram (came with 2). I have had to replace the battery with an aftermarket one once, and other than that it's been the best machine I've ever owned. I did not update to catlina however, I fear that may be a death knell

[philistine]

I am writing this from a 2013 Macbook Air. It works fine.

[raiyu]

Same. Amazing how well it’s held up.

I did need to do a repair on the motherboard as it stopped charging but one repair after 7 years is crazy.

[patrickthebold]

Meh, I used a $300 netbook for 6 years.

[tomcam]

OK I need to hear more about that one. I’m guessing it’s all command line development?

[patrickthebold]

It was I think dual core 1.5 G with a gig an a half of ram. It was an upgrade from 800Mhz Pentium III (this was a long time ago.) So it was doing normal personal computing things: Web browsing, photo manager, mp3 player, email, document editing (mostly latex, inkscape, gimp). I had a keyboard and an external monitor since the thing was too tiny.

[FridgeSeal]

Oldest phone that gets iOS updates is what, the 6s or the 7? The former having come out in 2015, that is an amazing support lifetime.

I’m planning on keeping my iPhone X past the end of the year, which takes it to a 3 year lifetime, which works out as ~$600/year which is amazing value.

[adiabatty]

Both the 6s(+) and the iPhone SE (the 5s-shaped one that people love for the small size) will be able to get iOS 14 when it comes out later this year.

[samatman]

Those are the oldest phones which still get new versions of iOS.

My mother has a 6, and it still gets security updates for (IIRC) iOS 11.

It's her second 6, by the way. The battery on the first one started inflating, and they replaced it with a refurbished unit for the price of a new battery.

No other company plays in the same league as Apple when it comes to product support.

[puranjay]

> save you money in the long run

My two broken Macbooks in 3 years say otherwise.

This might have been true 5 years ago, but the countless complaints of keyboard issues with 2017-19 era Macbooks says otherwise.

[asddubs]

that was definitely not my experience when I bought a macbook air a decade ago. after a year it was unusuably slow, and the insulation at some point flaked off the charger wire. i went with a thinkpad in the same form factor after that (a year later), and I'm still using that today

[flywheel]

>They often last for many more years than competitors' products

Apple products are often obsolete in a few years, especially iPads and iPhones. Their entire line of laptops and desktops is now practically obsolete with the move to ARM. Apple products are luxury products for people who can afford to simply throw away a device when Apple decides it's stopping support. I have several Apple devices that still boot up just fine, have capable CPUs inside, but are completely useless because Apple just decided they weren't interested in supporting them anymore.

[alwillis]

Apple products are often obsolete in a few years, especially iPads and iPhones.

The iPhone 6s was released September 2015 and it will run iOS 14, due later this summer/fall.

My daily driver is a refurb iPhone 7 (released September 2016) and I'm running the public beta of iOS 14—it runs noticeably faster than it did running iOS 13 just a few weeks ago.

I’m pretty sure nothing from Samsung, Motorola or HTC that's 4 or 5 years-old can run this year's Android release. Or even last year's.

iPadOS 14 goes all the way back to the iPad Air 2, which was released October 2014—nearly 6 years ago.

Their entire line of laptops and desktops is now practically obsolete with the move to ARM.

Nope. All current Intel Macs will continue to be supported for years to come. Updated apps will be fat binaries—they'll run natively on Intel and ARM Macs, the same way fat binaries ran natively on PowerPC and 68K Macs back in the day.

macOS 11.0 Big Sur will run natively on both Intel and ARM-based Macs; so will next year's macOS 11.1. All of the important, mainstream apps (Microsoft Office, Creative Suite, Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher, etc.) will be updated to run on ARM-based Macs in addition to the existing Intel ones.

My last machine was a 10-year old 27-inch iMac that I still use as a server.

I have several Apple devices that still boot up just fine, have capable CPUs inside, but are completely useless because Apple just decided they weren't interested in supporting them anymore.

If they can still run Homebrew, there's lots of software, especially open source stuff, you can install and run. The core apps I use for web development like Vim, command line utilities, etc. work fine on unsupported Macs. If I had to, I could install FreeBSD or Linux and keep things moving.

Most indie developers allow you to download older versions of their apps if you're a registered user.

Macs that don't have 64-bit CPUs couldn't make the jump to 64-bit world, which Apple has been warning about for like 10-years.

[flywheel]

>I’m pretty sure nothing from Samsung, Motorola or HTC that's 4 or 5 years-old can run this year's Android release. Or even last year's.

At least android phones can still download apps from the google app store, older iOS devices are just cut off. I have a perfectly good original iPad that's basically useless. The iPad 4 is similarly useless.

>My last machine was a 10-year old 27-inch iMac that I still use as a server.

My current workstation is 10 years old, running Windows 10 like a champ. It's got one of the first 6-core CPUs in it, a recent graphics card, and 32GB of RAM which I may upgrade to 64GB because it's cheap - I have no real reason to get a new workstation, this thing is still running circles around most recent quad-core systems. Your 10 year old mac wishes it were this capable.

I feel really sorry for anyone buying a mac now, since they will be obsolete as soon as the ARM macs are out.

[alwillis]

At least android phones can still download apps from the google app store, older iOS devices are just cut off.

My 7 year-old iPhone 5s is still supported by Apple; it runs iOS 12.4.6 and I just installed a bunch of apps on it.

I feel really sorry for anyone buying a mac now, since they will be obsolete as soon as the ARM macs are out.

The first ARM Macs will start shipping in just a few months; the current Intel Macs won't be obsolete, since they too will get the new operating system and Universal apps will run just fine on both. What part of this are you not understanding?

There's a difference between not the latest and greatest (the ARM Macs) and current, supported machine, like any Mac that can run Big Sur.

I have a PowerPC iMac Mini somewhere—that's obsolete as far as Apple is concerned.