Surely that’s more about to the fact that CPU speeds aren’t doubling every eighteen months anymore? It’s easy to stay relevant when you’re not ten times slower than current hardware after just five years. It’s not like computers are somehow designed to stay useful longer these days, they just do because the world has slowed down around them.

Agreed. My family uses daily a MacBook Pro I bought in a Thanksgiving sale in 2008. My wife is watching a movie on it as I type this.

A few years ago I thought, if I can get this thing to 10 years, that’s a great deal and I’ll be happy to upgrade. Now it seems like maybe I’ll be able to use it forever? I’ve had to replace one battery and one fan in almost 12 years. The DVD drive does not work anymore, but I don’t use DVDs anymore.

Honestly I think security will be the biggest concern long term. It can’t upgrade the OS anymore and while whatever version of OS X it’s on seems very stable (it never crashes), it’s not getting patches anymore from Apple. Something will come along at some point.

I just put 8 GB of RAM and an SSD in a mid-2010 Macbook Pro for a friend. The parts were free, but could be purchased for $100. Perfectly usable machine for web browsing and entertainment. It won't run Catalina, but who cares?

Google „high sierra patcher“. You can run High Sierra on a 2008 Macbook and still get security updates. For now.

Most of the computers (PCs & laptops) that I've had in the last 25 years lasted about this long, except for phones. I never had an Apple computer though... One Toshiba laptop, I had to replace a fan in that time frame.

I have a similar experience, I'm typing this on my 2013 MacBook Pro, I don't notice any significance performance issue, and all the hardware is still intact, it's really amazing. This was my first Mac, I'll 100% sure buy another one when this one decides to finally retire.

This isn’t usually case. There’s an “inverted bell curve” of failures. You get a lot of early failures then few in the middle of the lifecycle and then rapidly growing failures towards the end. It’s difficult to predict what that curve looks like and it depends on a combination of engineering, supply chain and luck.

You can usually work out where a product is on that lifecycle by looking at the amount of spare parts available on eBay. They are usually stripped down towards the end of the cycle rather than repaired as the rate of repairs is increasing. This is a good time to sell repairs as you have lots of cheap parts and lots of broken things on the market and no appetite for people to buy complete replacements.

Case in point on the bell curve, my 2018 MBA lasted two weeks before it died.

My 2 year old Macbook's screen in already dying (and at the risk of repeating redundant issues, some of the butterfly keys are already dead)

Just wanted to echo this sentiment as well. I just replaced my 15" 2010 Macbook Pro and the thing still runs strong. A battery replacement and SSD upgrade in 2015 really gave it a second life.

It's unfortunate it no longer gets software updates and also is plagued by the GPU Kernel Panic issue. Otherwise, I would keep it longer.

Hoping my new 2020 13" can last at least half as long!

Thinkpads last even longer. Pretty easy to find pre 2010s thinkpads that have no issue whatsoever and keep humming along as expected.

Less so recently. T440 and later are a terrible for reliability. Endless battery, charging problems and dead ports around the 4 years mark or so. In fact my T470 has just decided it doesn’t want to recognise any external batteries. Thankfully it has a few months support left on it or it’d be going in the trash (Logic board failure is common on them).

I’ve just replaced it with an iPad Pro and will use my desktop for everything else.

Interesting. My X240 has had none of those issues so far, nor anything else significant, after six years of daily use. (I think the fan is running more and faster than when it was new, and the internal battery isn't in great shape anymore, but those are to be expected with age.)

If issues with T4x0 from recent-ish years are indeed common, I wonder if the builds are somehow different. I don't abuse my hardware but I haven't been super careful most of the time either.

I have a similar 2013 vintage MBP. It's on it's 5th or 6th charger, 3rd charger board, 2nd battery, and 2nd speaker

https://twitter.com/moreati/status/1087046181434417152

Except for MagSafe it's a solid design.

I find MagSafe itself fine but the cables Apple uses between the charger bodies and the plugs are awful - I keep mine kind of together with sticky tape.

My 2013 had to get the case, touchpad, fans, and keyboard replaced do to a swelling battery. Also needed a second charger as apple cords break so easily. Outside of that, it still works great.

Kind of funny though that we are amazed that our stuff is running for 7 years considering my old Toyota lasted 20.

I’m still on my original magsafe from 2014

Not the parent, but I wish I could say the same about my MagSafe charger.

The insulation on the MagSafe side started flaking after some time, leaving blue stuff everywhere. Apple's Geniuses say that it's because I mishandled it, and refuse to cover it.

I think 7 years is probably at the high end. I work in a small company that started about 8 years ago, and most of the MacBooks (mixture of Pro and Air) we bought initially failed after 3 to 5 years for a range of issues (even the "second generation" have had failed units).

It's true - typing this on a 2013 Air - you kind of take it for granted but they work pretty well really. Though I had it open yesterday to replace the battery only to find they'd sent the wrong one for some other similar model, darn it.

I'm still using my 2009 MBP (updated HDD and replaced battery once) without problems. Unfortunately it seem's that I will have to update some time in the future because of missing software support :(

I've had the opposite experience - both my 2008 plastic Macbook and my 2011 Macbook Pro had enough quality issues in their first 3 or so years that I switched to other manufacturers.