Unfortunately Apple, although creating technically excellent products[0] is a very bad player as far as the environment is concerned. In particular, they insistence on thinness and related design choices (gluing everything together) makes the shelf life of their products relatively short. This is wrong no matter how you look at it. I have no problem with paying premium, I have a problem with the fact that my MacBook Pro from 2019 upgrades my main tool (Xcode) for a few hours, just because it is a 128GB model - supposedly the most popular one. I mean, it has "Pro" in the name, why does it behave like a toy? Why can't I replace the tiny 128GB drive with a 2TB one I just bought from Samsung? Because Apple decided I can't.
It wasn't always this way. Before the thinness craze, I think around 2013, you could freely replace your memory and disks - and I still have several of these machines beefed up.
[0] Most of the time - let's ignore little fucups everybody makes from time to time
Hmm, I mean I wish we'd still be in the 1990's with user-replaceable RAM, batteries, CPUs/GPUs and all, but I don't know that Apple specifically is a "very bad" player in terms of longevity and sustainability. The updates you get on iOS devices for years on end (up to 10!) is notably unheard of in Android land. In fact, I'm using my original iPad Mini (from 2013 or so) still without probs, and have installed games on it as recently as a couple months ago; and so do I run a four year old iPhone 6s that's doing just fine with up-to-date essential apps for banking, auth, CoVid contract tracing (until a couple of months ago when we still needed those), etc. Likewise, Apple notebooks have way better value retention/resale value, not to speak of battery power, display and overall quality. Whereas the Dell and Lenovo (Thinkpad, Latitude/Precision so comparable in price) notebooks I've received recently for customer project work have OOTB battery and other failures (I'm actually on my third or fourth Dell/Lenovo notebook within a little over half a year), to the point that I'm refusing to buy PC hardware as it is because it's just laughably last-gen compared to Apple, and sometimes not even that, it's not even funny anmore.
> makes the shelf life of their products relatively short
I don't know if this really holds, when you look at the bigger picture.
As for me I've owned an iPad 3rd gen (the first "Retina" iPad) from late 2012 to late 2016.
Then I owned an iPad Air 2 from late 2016 to this day... and I've decided to wait to see if they redesign the base iPad model (not Air) late this year - and if not then upgrade to the new AIR.
So that's 2 iPads between late 2012 to late 2022. 10 YEARS.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Considering how fast tech and software is moving these days if you can get 4-5 years out of your tablet AS A TECH USER that's pretty darn good.
If it was my Grandma, she'd probably still get to use my iPad Air 2 for another few years...
I don't see how it's different for other Apple products. The MINI's from 2012 are still being sold at a decent price and are very much sought after - Apple users love to use them as media servers. The M1 Mini likely will have a LOOOONG life ahead of them. Mine will probably resell in a heart beat even couples years from now.
It wasn't always this way. Before the thinness craze, I think around 2013, you could freely replace your memory and disks - and I still have several of these machines beefed up.
[0] Most of the time - let's ignore little fucups everybody makes from time to time