alt Hacker NewsFirst: it's not five years. It's five years if you posit that macs are magic and use no energy[1]. In practice they're 40-70% the consumption of a competing desktop (depends on usage and specific model, yada yada yada). So figure a few decades or thereabouts.
But even so: I'm not sure I know a single new-device Apple customer who has a single unit older than five years. The comment about power implied that you'd make up the big Mac price tag on power savings, and no, you won't, not nearly, before you hawk it on eBay to buy another.
[1] And also that you posit that the device is in a compute farm or something and pumped at full load 24/7. Average consumption for real development hardware (that spends 60% of its life in suspend and 90% of the remainder in idle) is much, much, much closer to zero than it is to 300W!
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Also judging from the state of 5 and 10y old mac computers on the second hand market, you quickly realize they aren't very reliable machines.
> First: it's not five years. It's five years if you posit that macs are magic and use no energy[1].
Huh? I'm not "positing" anything, I'm responding to the longevity you stated:
> you'd be looking at crossover in 5 years, or longer than the expected life of the device.
As for Apple users not having devices older than five years... ehm, yeah: the brand targets an audience that really likes shiny new toys (either because they're lured into thinking they need it, or because it's a status symbol for them). Not sure how that's relevant here though
Well, I know exactly what you're saying, but to be fair to Apple, my 68K Mac that's nearly 40 still works. My iMac G4 is fine. PowerMac G3 is fine. First gen Mac Pro is fine. Meanwhile, the only PCs I know of that survive time quite as well (and I collect old crap) were all nearly equivalent to Apple level pricing at the time of their introduction.
While Apple does charge nearly criminal markup for RAM and storage, they at least make some products that last (except for the TouchBar MacBooks' keyboards). I just hope my Mac Studio lasts too.