Whether it "works fine" (and my Pro works fine) is not the point. When you can now buy more powerful laptops with longer battery life for less money than current Macs, it becomes hard to justify the premium price for a Mac.

It seems like Apple is hoping the consumer won't notice and still buy the brand as though it's a designer item and not electronics. I suspect that this is not the primary motivation for their current lack of new tech. I think that the largest part for this regression from the cutting edge is a consequence of no longer having Steve Jobs pushing every part of the company for its utmost.

Apple, when you anthropomorphize the actions of the company as a whole, comes off as arrogant. They had earned this by actually delivering the best you could buy. The best laptops, the best phones, the best music players, the best tablets. With the exception of tablets, this is no longer true, in any category (not even phones). And that is the issue.

Not whether the device is still good enough. It ought to be the best, because that was what we came to expect from Apple. The premium ought to be a no-brainer because you get what you pay for. It isn't like that anymore and if you're a fan of Apple (and I have been since the Apple IIe) then you really wish it were.

Exactly. Apple could offer more RAM and innovation on the GPU side. And more ports.

2011 Air here. Audio hardware is all dead (speakers + mic + headphone jack), but it works for development.

If I can only expect to get 3 years of use from a laptop, that's pretty disappointing. Especially one that starts at $1300. Or $1550 if you want the warranty to actually cover it for that period.

So it's $43 / month or $10 / week. Is that really a big number for a primary work tool?

Yes, that is completely unreasonable. I expect hardware to last atleast 10 years. Nobody wants to be on some kind of constant upgrade treadmill. Not to mention the enormous environmental impact of un-repairable computers that you have to trash every X years.

If it were the only computer in existence, probably not. But it gets measured relative to all of its competitors, which get updated more than every two years and have their prices go down when they're old.

Also it's not my primary work tool. If your company wants to buy you one, great, but spending my personal hobby budget on outdated gear is a harder sell.

And yes, $43/month over 3 years is a lot of money. $1550, in fact. Breaking it down like that to make it feel like a smaller number is a shitty trick that only works because we have bad instincts at math.

Thirded. It still works like a champ after 4 years. No issues.

Same here, but I had to replace battery last year.