I have voted 5-6 years for partially the same reason you cited: after this period I feel that the vendors have mostly abandoned the machines, especially Apple.

They have a generous policy to support devices for a long time but my Intel Mac has visibly slowed down at places and I know for a fact its thermals are fine. Apple just doesn’t bother as much with devices they internally (and secretly) consider obsolete. I have also noticed my iPhone 12 Pro Max getting detectably slower in the last 3-6 months (and the battery is still shown as Peak Performance) which really started making me weary, if not angry. Planned obsolescence is alive and well, sadly. The corporations understood it’s a bad PR to announce it openly so the next order of business is to do it surreptitiously…

This is why I’ll gradually make a comeback to Linux. The laptop I have is actually fairly powerful and I know that for as long as the hardware is working well, Linux will keep it fast and reliable. Linux also doesn’t have (not by default) all the scanners and telemetry that Apple and Microsoft employ – in the case of Apple they literally scan every program after you start it which is resulting in a periodic lag when you work in the terminal for longer periods of time.

Macs have served their role in my career. I might buy a refurbished M1 or M2 on a low-mid configuration (i.e. with 16GB RAM so the OS does not trash the SSD and reduce its lifetime) because they are champions in battery life and are lightweight – I’ll need that when I start traveling and working on my own business(es). But outside of that I’m going full Linux (and I’ll be remoting into my home Linux machines with the Mac laptop as well; it’ll be a beautiful and lightweight thin client).

So if you make the same poll next year I am definitely voting “Until it breaks”.

I used to buy ThinkPad laptops because their keyboard is so nice and they’re pretty. I need Windows to do the control systems part of my job and occasionally travel to sites for work. The screen is cracked, the battery only ever really lasted a few hours under load and it will burn you if you put it on your bare legs. I bought an M3 MacBook Pro in December after checking that I could get away with running Citect and RSLogix on Windows ARM in a VM. The battery life is phenomenal and the performance is great. Keyboard is total rubbish compared to the ThinkPad and where the hell is my delete key. Stop pretending that your backspace key is a delete key, Apple.

My desktop is a stupidly overspecced 24core Threadripper with128GB RAM tower that I built in 2020 to run all manner of VMs at once. Hopefully lasts a long time cause it cost me and arm and a leg.

I think I’d still use my HP Zbook, but winter of 22/23 was hard in terms of electricity in Ukraine. I had to buy a new laptop with good battery and USB type C charger, so I could use power bank during power outages.

I’ve done something similar. Around 2017 I got Lenovo ThinkStation; this was a system that had “umph”… but was an older model close to not being sold anymore so was relatively cheap. I put some after-market upgrades in and that box continues to serve me very, very well. Right now I’m running dual Xeons with 10 physical cores each and 192GB RAM. Just like you describe, to not be limited when running VMs, concurrently running various workloads, or working well with largish data is something I’d have a hard time giving up at this point.

There are only really two issues with this buy big/hold long approach so far: vendors can put arbitrary constraints on you which can mess with your day. I do a lot of business type work and so I run with Windows 10 using WSL for most dev… but Windows 10 is effectively EOL and there is no upgrade path because my hardware is old enough not to support the correct TPM versions. Other equipment I want to use is made for compatibility with newer hardware and doesn’t mix well with my old workstation; I upgraded my monitor to a an ultrawide a year or so ago and it doesn’t want to work well with my older workstation (part of this is just their firmware isn’t any good, but still… )

I also use a laptop (Surface Book 3), but the workstation is my main axe.

Whenever a thread like this comes up, I guess. I had been perfectly content with my 12 yo desktop but ever since reading this thread I’ve been browsing newegg and amazon looking to build an upgrade.