Are ARM Macs going to get older quickly like iPads and iPhones?

[now i see it]

Intel's annual offerings aren't what have kept some Mac's from getting updated. There's been plenty of instances where an upgraded Intel CPU became available yet Apple continued to sell the same old Mac year after year after year with the same old CPU.
Mac upgrade cycles haven't been hampered by Intel- they've been hampered by Apple's neglect and disinterest.

 

[stratokaster]

I don't know about "quickly"... we still have two iPad Air 2s (released in 2014) in the family which will be fully supported by iPadOS 14. That is some very nice longevity if you ask me. FWIW, they work really well and even run Civilization 5 with acceptable framerate — something I can't say about my wife's MacBook Air of the same vintage!

 

[endlessike]

I think app store only and artificially shortened lifespan is aggressively anti-consumer and likely to draw federal/european anti-trust attention Apple really doesn’t want.

 

[dgdosen]

In recent history, Intel performance improvements weren't that great one year to the next. That'll probably change - at least for a few years - as Apple/TSMC crank out new chips on smaller and smaller nodes.

That won't make a 4 year old Arm mac any slower, it will just feel slower compared to a newer mac. Apple making huge perf improvements (making my older device appear slow) is better than Apple (Intel) not making huge perf improvements.

 

[Yebubbleman]

In iMac section of the forum you can bump into many posts, users telling that they are still using decade old iMacs. I wonder how will this thing change with the arrival of ARM based Macs? Are they going to age much faster like iPhones and iPads? Is Apple going to make us replace them every few years by limiting OS support on older devices? These are the dangerous questions I asked myself at first. I'm also sure the performance gain will be higher with Apple Silicon chips per watt. It's completely another thing.
I'm afraid of Tim Cook's ideas lurking in his mind? Those might be the same ones I'm worried about. Consequently we're talking about a complete salesman who just cried after an Apple TV+ ******** on stage to rob us also on monthly basis, always hesitated to spend on redesigning the products, also made ****** things to save a few cents more over a highly priced products i.e. flexgate, 480p webcam, intentionally underpowered MacBook Air.
I simply do not trust this man, what are your thoughts?

Apple's MO with kicking iOS and iPadOS devices out of an update is that the OS has bloated to the point of needing additional RAM in order to function properly. This is not a problem that macOS has suffered from in quite some time. Apple Silicon won't change this. Otherwise, the only two reasons why you'll see an Apple product (be it a Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, iPod touch, or Apple Watch) get left out of the updates party are that (in the case of the Mac) they cannot produce or procure a new enough driver and/or firmware for a component to work with the new operating system (in the case of the WiFi card that is kicking the Macs that could run Catalina but can't run Big Sur out of the Big Sur party) or that either the SoC (in the case of non-Macs) or a component doesn't support an OS feature that Apple deems critical to the future of the platform (i.e. Metal support). I strongly believe that this won't change going forward, but it's not like I can tell the future. That has been the trend with iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS devices, as well as Intel-based Macs for the better part of the past decade.

None of that negates some of Apple's more annoying practices for planned obsolescence, but I do believe that Apple has, at least as far as the Mac has been concerned, behaved well.