Would be nice to do that for OS releases too. I feel like the yearly macOS releases are too ambitious at this point, and Apple's software quality is suffering. 2-3 year cycles would be much more sustainable. Hardware is good enough now to not need a new release ever year.
Refresh cadence has little to do with sustainability.
Consider cars: manufactures come out with new ones each year with marginally differences. Is that somehow unsustainable and they should instead keep manufacturing an old design for years? Does that mean once the 2026 model starts manufactuing you go dump your 2025?
It makes more sense to iteratively improve your design and stop manufacturing old things if you can manufacture something better.
The real sustainability argument is about support length (which apple does well), and repairability (which apples does ). Changing to a 3 hear cycle is orthogonal to both of these.
Who's forcing you to get every upgrade every year?
The yearly releases make a lot of sense for everybody, because then you can upgrade on your own schedule, instead of delaying the upgrade because the product was released a full 2 years ago, at a time your older one is on its last breath.
In fact, yearly releases are then also more sustainable, too, since the purchasing would be spread out to each year (on an as-needed basis), instead of having a month-long cycle every 3 years, necessitating the extra infrastructure all along the way (from the stores to manufacturing to shipping).
For Apple computers, the last breath comes almost a decade after they were built.
If you wait until it dies, then you will want to get what's available at that time, but, if you plan from the start, you'll have a lot of flexibility with these machines.
My MBP is the same age as my Thinkpad, and looks much nicer.
Yeah, Apple's products are pretty long lived in my experience.
My '07 macbook lasted till 2020. It was almost as tough as any thinkpad I've had. My x220t, 2008ish, is still going. Both did damage to the hoods of a few cars.
Last I heard, my iPod nano from 20+ years ago is still being used daily. Only other portable music player I've had last that long was a Walkman.
I've got friends with old ass powerBooks that still get used frequently.
5+ years for home users and systems administrators. I have a 2020 M1 MacBook Air, it's fine for everything I need. The only issue is, as other points out, the external monitor issue. Only one monitor, and certainly no daisy chaining of displays.
My M1 Pro turns 5 pretty soon and I don’t even have the tinge of an itch to upgrade. Which maybe isn’t great for Apple since Nvidia ended up getting my $1000 this year.
