For Apple Laptops, more like 7-8, at least in the old days.

Typically you would only replace them when they (gradually) became annoyingly slow for daily use.

Agreed, I had to upgrade all of of my PowerBooks/MacBooks at some point with RAM and larger HDDs/SSDs.

And my last Apple Laptop is from 2012 and I learned that Apple now drops support by the OS considerably earlier than in the old days (i.e. unecesarily early, most 8-10 year old MacBooks would be perfectly fine for daily use, but now unsafe) - at least that was my impression.

And installing Linux on them is always a mixed bag (fans, trackpad, etc.), even though it sure is better with Intel Macs.

I bought a macbook air in ~2012 and it was unusably slow after a year. bought a thinkpad to put linux on after that that I'm still using today (although admittedly it's a bit of a wreck now - still, it lasted for 8 years)

The MacBook Air was not really a "high performance" machine to start with though - you can't compare that with a ThinkPad :)

And it was seldomly updated, so you could get very aged specs.

If you bought a MacBook 2011/2012 you would typically get an HDD and between 4 and 8GB RAM. Software requirements/demands sky-rocketed shortly after that. On a non-Air you could at least upgrade this yourself, which gave the machine new life ("just like new")

it did have a 128gb ssd. The thinkpad was also an x1 carbon (also 4gb of ram), so it had a similar form factor, not sure about cpu specs, I probably should have mentioned that.

I bought the 2011 MacBook Air 11" and it still performs really well for everyday tasks, probably the best computer I've ever owned.

Interesting, I wonder why mine slowed down so much then. From what I remember it was after an OS upgrade, it was my first time trying a mac, and I ended up being disappointed and going back to linux, but I also didn't do a deep dive into figuring out the reasons for it.

I believe the 2011 era MacBook Air (EveryMac.com confirms only the 11”) had an entry level 2GB RAM variant. That one probably got pretty painful after just a couple OS updates.

Shouldn’t be unsafe. Security updates are still coming out for the older OS that runs on these machines.

That is not true AFAIK

Sorry. I guess I got the year wrong. I’ve got an MBP from ‘12 still getting security updates.

AFAIK other than the 32 bit devices and some with smaller vram, all Intel Macs are still supported

This is not true at all.

My HP laptop is 7 years old and still works well. 4xxx i7 8 threads, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD (upgrades, of course.) A new laptop with a newer CPU and NVMe would be faster but it's still subjectively fast enough for my work. I'll upgrade when it breaks down and I won't be able to repair it. I keep an eye on candidates.

MacBooks can easily exceed 10+ years rock solid. (Only battery may need a replacement)

Not anymore. Now Apple will drop MacOS support for their computers way earlier. I tried to update my barely used MacBook from 2012/2013 somewhere last year and learned that it was dropped quite some time ago - so if I would have kept it on the newest release (there were serious bugs, I was hesitant), I think it would have got around 8 years max, if memory serves me right. No security updates at all anymore, not possible to download older release than the newest. I did not expect that.

And I had to upgrade SSD and RAM 2 and 4 years after buying, it became unusable for work (granted, it was not spec'ed out originally).

MacBook Pros and Airs from 2012 are supported by Catalina, and that is still getting security releases. It does require 4GB of RAM though if you didn’t have that to start with.

Aehm, thanks?

If you bought your MacBook until MID 2012, you're out of luck though.

And 10 years old would be early 2011, and those are also not supported.

Mojave has the same requirements basically, that leaves High Sierra, and High Sierra had a few months of support left (ended Dec 2020), so I just aborted.

Obviously that depends on a number of factors, including whether you purchase early or late in the generational cycle, whether you spring for the extra memory, total hours of runtime, exposure to rough handling / mechanical stress, and of course blind luck.

Not anymore? It's not like battery replacement is very viable on modern Macs, and the SSD wear issue means that most of these "daily driver" machines will end up dead in more like 3 or 4 years.

But yes, older Macs were notorious for being great machines.

> It's not like battery replacement is very viable on modern Macs

Why? Apple still offers battery replacements for modern Macs, and some more adventurous types of people still do it themselves. They're glued to the chassis, not spot welded.

While I’d much prefer if the SSDs were replaceable, I don’t think there’s any evidence that Apple SSDs were failing or will fail in only 3-4 years.

Apple SSDs have historically had a lower TBW than the rest of the drives on the market, and combined with their swap abuse issue right now, I think it's fair for people to be alarmed.

Not if the computer becomes a paperweight after those 5 years. If Apple wants me to consider a Mac, they need to make the NVME user-servicable, no exceptions. If the current chassis leaks are true, Apple has no excuse not to use the extra space inside their Professional(!!!) machine to give it a relatively standard feature found in laptops half it's price. There's no excuse anymore.

There's one post that I just noticed in there reporting 10% usage after 60 days, let's assume that one's an outlier.

Enterprise Thinkpads easily last 10+ years. Although you will need to change the battery at some point.

I think my current work laptop is 6-7 years old. My backup laptop is 11 years old.

Still I think a lot of Thinkpads need some parts (often the motherboard!) replaced before they run out of extended on-site repair warranty. The small sample from my co-workers seems to indicate that the rate for that is over 50%. Maybe I just happen to know all the people who use their laptops as shovels.

That said, my 2015 HP Zbook (previously in contracting work, now personal use) still works perfectly, only now with third keyboard, third battery, and a bit of superglue.