My Surface Pro 3 is coming up on 6 years, and my XPS 13 is close to 7. And the thing is; I can see ZERO reasons to upgrade. Both devices still have good battery life, and are perfectly fast for any day-to-day jobs I do, including running Visual Studio. I even use my surface for music production and it packs plenty of oomph.
PC improvements have slowed down so much in the last decade, it used to be that every 2-3 years a new computer would run circles around your old hardware. not so anymore.
My main PC, a desktop tower I built in 2013, has received only a handful of upgrades since I built it. A new SSD in 2015, a 2060RTX last year, and just now I bought an NVMe PCIe adapter and a 1tb drive. This thing is basically "top of the line" despite sporting a an almost 8 years old i7 Extreme 4930k.
> [Microsoft Surface devices get] firmware and driver updates for about four years after they are first released. This is a little better than Chromebooks and a little worse than Apple computers.
My iPhone 5s received a system software update a few days ago. I was not expecting support for iOS 12.
> Before Windows 10, Microsoft usually supported each version of Windows for about three to five years.
Fact is that Windows lasts a really long time. While I realize that corporate support contracts are a different world, Windows XP lasted forever.
Is 3 to 5 years of updates a reasonable expectation? What do people expect from (for example) Wal Mart laptops?