Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?
I doubt it. I'm certainly not, and none of my peers at other companies locally are either. Even less so now that plenty of business class laptops are coming with soldered ram anyway. The MO is to just replace the machine once its out of warranty.
My experiences cover only Europe, mostly in sasec (safety and security, not infosec) shops, including sasec-related engineering and product development. The only Macs I see in any pro capacity are those of clients and rent-a-lecturer/instructor-types, the latter seldomly part of the industry. In my neck of the woods we run mostly on machines from Panasonic and Lenovo; in-house repair labs are a thing (some of them with expertise and equipment that makes the Rechenzentren at the local universities bow their heads in shame).
What a lot Apple people don't seem to get into their heads is that there's user segments to whom the virtues of Apple's "silicon" is utterly irrelevant; the small benefits you'd get out of it are completely negated by a litany of cons that makes their products completely undesirable.
If your standard developer laptop has a 256 GB SSD, but a certain team needs more disk space due to the work they're doing, you can just add a second nvme for a fraction of the cost and inconvenience of replacing the whole laptop.
Probably helps the IT center folks are actually employees of Dell and this service is part of the deal Boeing has with Dell. Lots of big companies have similar deals with their hardware vendors.
Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the default laptop sizing comes with a standard usage in mind but more space and ram is justified for other roles. Sure you could have different laptop models but if you are fine with just more ram and disk space why not?
I think part of the problem is all our laptops have smart card slots on them, and that limits the available options.
But even I haven’t done that in several years now, once IT moved to providing 16GB memory and SSD’s as a baseline, there’s really nothing left in a box to upgrade. I’m quite happy enough to not have to care.
This is especially true if the business is writing down the replaced hardware as depreciated capital, compared to say simply adding a stick of RAM.
Aside from that, almost always a new PC - almost! When times haven't been so good, I've had spot upgrades.
All of the above is just a question of running the numbers and minimising for cost, I'm sure.
We're talking about enterprises here, not home tinkerers.
Enterprises buy whole computers and replace them every x years. They don't waste expensive IT employee time running around upgrading machines all the time.
The last time I worked for a company that did any repair of its computers was around 2005, when all ~500 Dells in the office had to have their defective motherboards replaced.