> why do people feel the need to buy a new laptop every three years?

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.

Well, a lot of people aren't upgrading old MacBooks because the new ones have been such shite.

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.

Some people probably have some write-off system, or perhaps resell them why the devices still have some value so they always are somewhere 'in the middle'.

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.

Because the overall degradation. Sometimes I want 10% of 'everything', plus a new feature, plus less weight to carry around. That's practically been the only driver of my personal upgrades over the last 15 years.

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.

> but the degradation of productivity on the current device vs. new device.

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"?

For example if I run something that can take advantage of AVX512 and my current CPU doesn't have that but a new CPU does. Same goes for TB2 vs. TB3, very useful when you want to connect an external GPU. It does work on Thunderbolt 2 but the extra bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 is a nice improvement.

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.

> For example if I run something that can take advantage of AVX512 and my current CPU doesn't have that but a new CPU does. Same goes for TB2 vs. TB3, very useful when you want to connect an external GPU. It does work on Thunderbolt 2 but the extra bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 is a nice improvement.

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.

Seems you are responding to the wrong thread here. User the_af was asking me why I replace a machine and I answered with some reasons specific to me. This was a deeper dive in to the point that some people don't need to upgrade at all because they don't do anything different between day 1 of their usage or day 1780. And they don't need to because the laptops of the last decade don't fall apart as much as they used to and a Mac specifically tends to work well during its entire lifecycle. This is also why there aren't as much people interested in modifying their computers mid-lifecycle.

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.

Apple devices do hold their value fairly well (certainly much better than non-Apple hardware), so the cost is offset somewhat.

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.

How many upgrade their personal laptops every 3 years?

Work one, sure. But I haven’t upgraded my Mac in years.

Work one gets at least 4 years of life, it's not good for value beyond that due to write-offs etc, which is somewhat strange when you think about it. After that, they are sold to whoever wants them (we wipe them, clean them and unlock them).

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.

Most normal people I know have 10+ year old laptops machines. People that buy laptops every 3 years are pros or enthusiasts that want the best performance.