Yup - I was happily doing everything I always do (as above) on my 15" 2012 MBP w/ 16GB memory up until some power chip on the mobo died. It was only lagging a bit w/ certain websites in Chrome. I still have three other Macs from around 2012 working just fine, one being my music server.

So I was asking myself if I "need" the fancy laptop screen and excellent audio of a 14" MBP for $2K (no video production, no graphic design, no VR/AR, but hey, Electron apps all day long!).

Answer is no, clearly. But any Apple Silicon at this point is (hopefully) another ten year machine.

Except each macOS upgrade slows down the machine to a crawl. I still remember when I got my 2013 MBP 15”, you opened the screen and the login appeared smoothly. Now it struggles at each step of the fade in, and lags a few seconds before showing the password box.

Or you know, maybe they like that it has an improved camera, better battery life (eg. after switching from Intel to Apple Silicon), larger color space which allows them to edit photos better, or the laptop got better speakers, or the laptop became more thin, or added support for fast charging, or maybe many crappy Electron apps makes them update more regularly? People can have all kinds of good reasons to update their laptop.

That said, I know plenty of Mac users who upgrade maybe every 4 or 5 years.

The first thing I noticed when getting an M1 was that Jira became fast

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>The fact that these people keep updating devices constantly is a testament to Apple's marketing.

Seems apt to post this exceptionally cheesy Mac ad: https://youtu.be/8kF5x2D3rqo