I think the percentage of users that would buy a new, 1500$+ machine instead of a small 100$ upgrade is much lower than one expects living in a bit of an echo chamber. There's a lot of people that get burned by outrageous repair prices or that buy new computers when they could simply upgrade a part.
Ask yourself; if you've never felt the need to upgrade a laptop or to replace a break, then why really would you upgrade?
Beats me. You will often see comments in these threads about people (like me) using nearly decade-old Macbook Pros to this day.
I stopped replacing laptops every 3 (or less) years after I stopped buying budget non-Apple laptops.
I'm on Linux, and a laptop I can take apart and replace bits of, so I can see myself using this one for a few years more.
My Dell XPS 15 is suffering from Windows Rot after only two years. When I get a free afternoon I'm going to have to back it all up and clean it out, hopefully avoid reinstalling from scratch. For all the negativity I've had towards OS X, at least it's better than that.
I personally tend to keep my most recent device and the new device at the same time for about 2 years because of vendor lag (happens a lot with those classical software vendors that take months between software releases) and because I need the ability to compare between versions of both hardware and software. The newest device gets promoted daily driver (usually many benefits there, as they often are lighter yet more powerful). In general it means 2.25-ish devices per 10 years.
Other hardware, like SBCs tend to rotate out slower, but generic x86 platforms rotate out faster because if a critical component fails the labour for finding parts and replacing them is too much vs. buying up to date replacements. Luckily, due to lower usage of those machines they last longer, so technically the Apple hardware made the non-Apple hardware have a longer lifecycle in my case.
There is some irony in there as I do provide board-level repairs and the machines I work on for other people are ones I'd never personally invest in.
And by degradation I don't mean the existing device degrades per se, but the degradation of productivity on the current device vs. new device.
At the same time, the way work is done has changed a lot for me and the people around me: heavy workloads are almost never done on a laptop anymore.
What does this mean? Do you mean your current device starts working poorly (but that would mean "existing device degrades per se", which you ruled out) or that the existence of a new device automatically makes you perceive your device as being of "degraded productivity"?
Say you change your workload model there might be ~20% improvements between bare metal, virtual machines and containers. If you simulate a part of infrastructure using containers you may not need more RAM, but more CPU would be nice. But when you then want to do a lot of recording/capturing and process that, RAM gets more important. Just upgrading the RAM wouldn't help much because without a CPU to generate the data you might as well offload the whole thing.
This is definitely an echo-chamber/bubble point of view. The vast majority of users out there don't even know or care what AVX is, don't use external GPUs, and don't know or care about the difference between Thunderbolt 2 and 3.
If you personally need these things and want to buy a new machine every few years, then that's great, you should do that. But there are a ton of people who would benefit from an easily-repairable, easily-upgradable (RAM, storage) machine that end up dropping $1500 every few years instead of the couple hundred they could instead spend for a reasonable upgrade.
While I bet that there are a lot of people that do want to modify their systems, they are such a minority that it's not very logical for a large multinational to invest in that to the detriment of other goals. It might simply mean that you are not the target audience for their product(s).
Some other manufacturers/brands have the same, while others do a mixed portfolio to cater to smaller groups as well. We also have large manufacturers that cater to the classical enterprises which still run on the old idea that you need a fleet of identical machines and then swap out parts all day long, so machines that have facilities for that exist. Most notably Lenovo, HP and Dell do that.
I whinge about the non-upgradability of our devices as much as the next guy, but it's not like people are throwing their 3 year old macbooks in the trash can.
Work one, sure. But I haven’t upgraded my Mac in years.
Most people get close to 8 years before they actually want a new one when their work doesn't change much -- if your requirements don't change and your tool fits, no reason to change.
My opinion is that people switch machines more often precisely because they're not upgradable/repairable. I think if most people could go to their local computer repair shop to get RAM/storage/etc. replaced or upgraded, we'd have a lot less electronics waste, and consumer computers would last a lot longer.
At this point, software CPU and GPU needs aren't increasing all that much year by year, unless you're a gamer or do HPC. For the rest of everyone -- the majority -- a CPU and GPU made 5-10 years ago is still just fine for what they want to do. These old machines just need more RAM and sometimes more storage.
I get that it's hard to fit sockets for replaceable modules when everyone wants a super thin laptop, but overall this is a source of so much economic and physical waste.
Most computer repair shops around here have disappeared because it's no longer the way people buy and use their computers. At least not enough people to keep those shops running.
Sometimes people upgrade because they feel like it. Doesn't always have to do with the numbers.
However, I think Apple (and other laptop manufacturers) cross the line when they ship soldered-in batteries with their laptops. Batteries are consumable components that are guaranteed to degrade over time. Unlike RAM, which, assuming Apple sources it from quality vendors, you can expect to last for many years, laptop batteries will definitely begin to degrade within a few years, and will, over enough time, render the laptop unusable. Apple is producing $1500+ laptops with a non-replaceable component that will, without a doubt, eventually break down. Your options at that point are to buy a new laptop, or to send it to Apple so they can charge an arm and a leg to replace the entire top case instead of just the battery (as that'd be impossible). You should buy a new laptop when you want to, not because you "might as well" without the option of battery replacement, and with Apple's "repair" option costing a quarter of the price of a new one.
Though to a lesser extent, it also irks me that the SSDs are soldered in, not necessarily because I'd want the ability to upgrade them post-purchase, but mainly because your valuable data lives there, and it will become trapped on a dead board if something goes wrong with an unrelated component. Even if failures like this are rare, the threat of data loss while using a MacBook would still concern me more than while using a laptop with a replaceable SSD. I believe Apple has a data recovery procedure, but you'd still have to send your laptop to them and cross your fingers in the event it dies, whereas if the SSD wasn't soldered in, you'd have the option of manually recovering your data, or taking it to a repair shop where they could do it for you.
I would love to see a MacBook Pro with, at the very least, a replaceable battery (but especially with a replaceable SSD as well).
I know that a lot of people are very emotional about their RAM and SSDs and it can be a PITA, but it doesn't affect as many people as you'd think. At least that's what the available data shows.
SSD's don't fail the way they used to, RAM requirements don't change as much as it used to and while batteries do die, at this time I've seen more people switch machines before any of that happens.
The last time I wanted or needed to replace memory or storage in a laptop must have been 7 years ago, and I don't see anyone else doing that either. Even desktop upgrades are somewhat dead at this point, except for a GPU upgrade if someone is a gamer, or storage upgrade if people still use direct attached storage and didn't get enough when they initially got the machine.
Just because a scenario that hits a small percentage of DIY users is getting hard doesn't mean it's bad for everyone else as well.