Nah, they suck at it.
My GF is just finishing her bachelors thesis in the living room on my 2013 MBP with 4 GB RAM. First battery, updated all the way from Mavericks to Big Sur. Still supported, still useful and prettier than 80 % machines out there.
The lack of communication was a problem but "planned obsolescence" in this case is just tin-foil hat nonsense.
It was still going strong after almost a decade of use and got €300 as a trade-in. If that’s Apple‘s idea of planned obsolescence, I support their plan.
My 2012 MBA is used daily and heavily by my mother and graphic designer sister. My 2015 MBA replaced that iMac and now I'm trying to find an excuse to replace my current 2019 MBA because M1s are reaaally attractive. Essentially I've convinced myself Apple is anouncing laptops later in the year that look like the newest iMacs, just so I wait.
If that's their game, they are terrible at it.
Seeing that Macs hold their resale value for longer, for mobile they release iOS updates for longer than any other Android vendor, and so on.
What Apple is good at is making the product an "Apple only can fix/change" affair. But that's not the same as planned obsolescence game.
>With a maximum memory size of 8G it's a bit anemic
Is it? The majority of non-Apple laptops in 2021 are sold at 8G and below. And for people's use (web, surfing, email, Slack, Zoom, regular apps, etc) that the Air and smaller MBPs are aimed at, that has always been plenty.
(In fact, outside of video, audio, 3D, VM, and number crunching work, it's crazy that people would need more than that for the same stuff, computationaly wise, we did 10-15 years ago with much less RAM - blame Electron).
And 16GB and below is something like the 95% percentile or above.
Most other smartphone brands: hold my beer
That said, was this upgrade to Android 7.1 officially supported by Samsung?
In 2015, Apple released the iPhone 6S. It has not stopped receiving day-one software updates. For anyone who still has one (two in my circle of family and friends still have their 6S) they are still working great on iOS 14.5.
Edit: Since posting this comment, the parent has been edited to include "hope you got the 16G version" -- at the time I replied, jacquesm's comment mistakenly asserted an absolute "maximum memory size of 8G."
Did I miss it? Or can‘t I see it if there is no availability anymore? Anyone a link?
This link might work: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air/space-gray-ap...
I'm skipping these for now, I run Linux on all my machines and it typically takes a while for the wrinkles to be ironed out, and x86 has much better support than M1. I do think it is time that we became less fixated on x86 and more CPU architectures is better. Another reason for the skip is that the last two Apple products I've owned (both MacBook Airs) have not lived up to expectation, the one had a keyboard that went bad after only two years with nothing but perfectly normal use, the other has a battery that didn't even go through 50 full charge / discharge cycles and that only holds 5 minutes worth of charge. Both of these issues developed out of warranty.