I’ve been using Macs since the iBook G3 ‘Snow’ of 2001.
Back then Apple was a comparatively tiny company. Their hard detail engineering was not as good as it became. Their computers were loaded with discrete parts that failed for numerous common reasons.
My particular iBook developed a flaky power connector and other problems. It was a creaky plastic affair from the beginning.
Then I was a poor student and, after that new iBook, went through a series of used laptops that developed bad power converters, logic boards, optical drives, GPU solder joints, USB ports, you name it. One of them randomly went to sleep because of a bad ambient light sensor (from memory).
I was especially fond of a 12-inch PowerBook G4 1.33 GHz (that I bought with 256 MB of RAM but ‘maxed out’ to 1.25 GB). I fitted a roomy 60 GB 7200 RPM Hitachi 7K100 drive too. Those were the days … until the screen started glitching.
My point is that I changed laptops often, because they broke often.
Then there was the architecture switch to Intel that made PowerPC obsolete overnight. I held out until the aluminium unibody MacBook with LED backlighting in late 2008, which was a huge leap forward in the quality and durability of Apple laptops.
However, Retina displays arrived in 2012 and were incredibly compelling if you worked with type. So I upgraded in 2013 for that reason. The rest of my five-year-old laptop was still perfect.
Thereafter improvements slowed to a trickle until the next architecture change to Apple Silicon.
So my ownership duration trend has increased from months to about five years, with major technological step changes being the driver now.
) So, when it bites the dust is my answer…