Technology
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You're right. They're official timelines aren't super duper long. But it's still longer than any other laptop I've ever owned. I'm not supporting Apple here. I'm just acknowledging their laptops last a very long time. To the point where most people are going to upgrade out of the laptop before it breaks on them. That at least that's my personal experience
I am confused, it seems like two of macOS's competitor: windows and linux, all have much longer support period than apple.
I am using a surface laptop 2 which is almost 5 years old, and given that there is no major version of windows planned, it is hard to imagine that it will become unsupported in 2 years.
Granted many people unnecessarily update their hardware, simply because "new one is better", which is honestly a quiet disappointing trend for me. From my personal experience, apple product buyer seems to have a higher tendency to engage in this trend, for reason unclear to me.
The major difference is Windows and Linux are not as tightly coupled as Mac OS. You can have a Windows laptop which gets updates to Windows operating system even though the hardware is no longer getting driver updates. So if there's a known security issue in your Bluetooth driver for example, nothing will get patched. And you will continue going forward blissfully unaware that you're exposed to a major security vulnerability because Windows itself is not responsible for your Bluetooth driver. And the same for Linux. Just because it can run on the hardware doesn't mean the ecosystem is being maintained.
Apples is the extreme other end of the spectrum. Everything on the computer is being maintained by Apple every piece of hardware is getting hardware updates from Apple, and they're integrated into the operating system. So because of that Apple's providing stronger guarantees if you're within the support window. If you fall out of the support window you can still hack the Mac to run the new versions of Mac OS, and you can still run the old versions of Mac OS without updates.
So it's down to the business guarantees that you're being given by the ecosystem. Apple gives very strong guarantees for a very long period of time.
Windows gives weak guarantees for a very very long period of time, and strong guarantees almost never. Unless you're buying directly from Microsoft and even then they're not guaranteeing hardware updates for every piece of hardware in the system.
And Linux gives no guarantees for hardware