Wouldn't 4 to 5 years of full-day usage be just fine for worst case life expectancy for a laptop?
I've had one that gave up on 3 years, a couple months after warranty ended (that seemed to be quite common for that brand at the time).
I've had one that gave up on 3 years, a couple months after warranty ended (that seemed to be quite common for that brand at the time).
Typically you would only replace them when they (gradually) became annoyingly slow for daily use.
Agreed, I had to upgrade all of of my PowerBooks/MacBooks at some point with RAM and larger HDDs/SSDs.
And my last Apple Laptop is from 2012 and I learned that Apple now drops support by the OS considerably earlier than in the old days (i.e. unecesarily early, most 8-10 year old MacBooks would be perfectly fine for daily use, but now unsafe) - at least that was my impression.
And installing Linux on them is always a mixed bag (fans, trackpad, etc.), even though it sure is better with Intel Macs.
And it was seldomly updated, so you could get very aged specs.
If you bought a MacBook 2011/2012 you would typically get an HDD and between 4 and 8GB RAM. Software requirements/demands sky-rocketed shortly after that. On a non-Air you could at least upgrade this yourself, which gave the machine new life ("just like new")
And I had to upgrade SSD and RAM 2 and 4 years after buying, it became unusable for work (granted, it was not spec'ed out originally).
If you bought your MacBook until MID 2012, you're out of luck though.
And 10 years old would be early 2011, and those are also not supported.
Mojave has the same requirements basically, that leaves High Sierra, and High Sierra had a few months of support left (ended Dec 2020), so I just aborted.
But yes, older Macs were notorious for being great machines.
Why? Apple still offers battery replacements for modern Macs, and some more adventurous types of people still do it themselves. They're glued to the chassis, not spot welded.
I think my current work laptop is 6-7 years old. My backup laptop is 11 years old.
That said, my 2015 HP Zbook (previously in contracting work, now personal use) still works perfectly, only now with third keyboard, third battery, and a bit of superglue.