What obligations does Apple have after designing, manufacturing, distributing, and wildly profiting from what they are now arbitrarily classifying as e-waste?

Currently Apple is reaping all the financial rewards and taking responsibility for very few of the externalities. Does this mean it's what's best? It might seem like a stretch today, but in the medium to long-term, true sustainability is important.

Apple could at least (1) not cripple the devices software and (2) coordinate with a generic manufacturer or supplier to provide replacement parts and competent service and/or updates.

Apple could surely dig around the couch for some spare change and locate the resources to make this happen.

Putting aside whatever "true sustainability" means, it's unlikely that it's a money thing. It's probably more related to the efficiency of individuals in organizations as they grow, and Apple is already quite large.

It is absolutely a money thing. If Apple didn't have to worry about the commercialization of MacOS, then they could publish the driver code so Windows and Linux clients could offer support theoretically "forever".

They do not publish the drivers though, which means groups like Asahi have to waste their life-hours reverse-engineering for sustainability purposes.

Its like asking how long a car can last. Apple makes it difficult to continue using them

We're not talking about cars, we're talking about computers. What computer manufacturer provides Apple's level of support for 7 year old hardware?

Apple just has the decency to communicate what hardware it considers to be officially obsolete.

The relevant difference between cars and computers in this case is what, exactly? They are both high-tech, require a lot of resources to manufacture, and can remain useful over a long period of time.

They are dramatically different industries.

Let me reiterate, what computer manufacturer provides Apple’s level of support for more than 7 years?

Plenty, when you pay enterprise support contracts, but Apple doesn't do enterprise actually.

Please provide some examples, because the few programs I’ve found (enterprise-level and not cheap, example: Dell ProSupport Plus) all end at a max of 5 years after purchase date.

That would be breaking NDAs.

Google is out of the Chromebook hardware market, but they provides ChromeOS updates for 10 years on current machines.

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en

The problem is that Apple doesn't open-source their drivers and firmware, so those things won't get security updates even if you're using a third-party OS that otherwise does. If I were in charge, companies would be obligated to keep providing security updates for all hardware they sold until they either did open-source everything, or provided full refunds to everyone who ever bought one.