Something that surprised me was that my MacBook that is pristine but 5 years old do not get any more OS updates.. and therefore no latest Xcode.. and therefore worthless to me. Are all iOS/Mac devs buying new machines every five years?
Another is to just buy used every couple years. Buy a 1- or 2-year-old Macbook or iPad or whatever, sell a couple years later, repeat. Average annual spending can be surprisingly low this way, after an initial higher expenditure to buy your "ticket" to this train, of course, while still keeping you on recent devices just about all the time.
Some businesses simply lease their Macs, so don't really have that problem. They'll lease a new set of devices long before any go out of support.
Overall, any budget-conscious Apple strategy has to factor in the used market. Even if you're always buying new, if you time sales right you can recover a lot of your purchase price by selling your old devices. This can seem a little weird if you're used to the used market for consumer PCs—in that world, holding on to every device until it is totally worthless makes a lot more sense, because they lose used-market value much faster than Macs.
Always check that when buying any Apple products.
If you bought high-end-ish laptops in 2021, 2016, 2011, 2006, you’d have gone through 3 different microarchitectures, and had a transformative experience change on each upgrade. If you upgrade every year, not so much.
I don’t like the XCode MacOS version requirements - I couldnt build the JVM a while back because my work hadnt yet approved Monterey but XCode required it. That was annoying.
So I would say, maintain your old computer and the one before that as testing laptops, so you know what the plebs have to put up with.
I am now worried about a possible upcoming "M3" announcement in the next week or so.
And I am only half-joking -- a while back I was funded and ready-to-purchase an M1 MacBook Pro and that same day the "M2" announcements hit.
As a result I could not get myself to pull-the-trigger on the M1 purchase.
I buy one every three years - just before my AppleCare expires.
My company lets you buy a new computer every three years.