[sokoloff]

I think the “Macs are owned longer than PCs” is under-appreciated. My previous MBPro was 6 years old when I upgraded. My wife’s daily as a freelance editor is a mid-2013 MacBook Air. That puts our total capital cost for that computer at under $10/mo.

What would high-cost really be? $5/workday isn’t even high-cost to me if it was a daily coffee bill, but certainly not if it’s your main computing device.

[awilfox]

Oh, my grandmother is still happily using her mid-2012 iMac, and my 2011 MBP is still kicking around for the occasional 32-bit only app (some older games mostly).

The problem is initial capex: you have to have that amount of money all at once, even if it is cheaper in the long run. Some people do not have access to even credit of that amount, let alone the cash for it.

[pmontra]

My HP ZBook 15 from 2014 cumulatively cost me some 2000 Euro considering all the upgrades and replacements. 2 1TB SSD, 32 GB RAM, at least a couple of keyboards (key wear after years of use.) So it's 8 years and going. If the benchmark is the 300 Euro supermarket laptop, well, I've seen friends changing one every two years and another one telling me that it's crazy she has to change her one because it's not even 20 years old (maybe one of the first Vista PCs.)

About my own laptop, given my kind of work (web development Rails, Django, Elixir) I don't see reasons to buy something more recent and faster. On a current project Rails test suite it's slower than a M1 75 s vs 50 s but I can live with that considering that we're not running all tests every time. Typing in an editor is as fast as any computer was in the last 30+ years. I expect to have to replace it either because of missing spare parts or some NVIDIA / Linux kernel incompatibilities in the next years.

[tharne]

> I think the “Macs are owned longer than PCs” is under-appreciated.

I don't like Macs these days, but this is 100% true. In my experience, people who buy macs keep them significantly longer, so comparing simply the price tag of Mac vs. PC is very misleading. The correct comparison is "total cost of ownership".

[perfopt]

Length of use really depends on the user. I typically use any computer system or Phone for 5-6 years at the minimum. Usually with a battery change after year 3 (or 4 if I am lucky).

As for desktops, I use them for even longer. I still use a first gen PPC Mac Mini as a in-home music streamer. I no longer run Mac OS X on it since there are no security updates.

[diffeomorphism]

Are they? There does not seem to be a real difference to other $1000 or $2000 PC Laptops.