The lifecycle for Apple devices are far shorter than their PC and Android counterparts. When I abandoned my PPC Mac in 2009 and suffered through iTunes withdrawal (read: wrote off the ~$500 in music and movies I had bought), I switched to Amazon for media where, funnily enough, everything worked fine right in the browser on that same Mac. Still does to this day. I'm typing this on a Dell Laptop I got a year after that Mac, running Ubuntu, and the media I bought on Amazon works fine on this too.
It makes a ton of sense for Apple as a business to sell their products at a premium and more sense still to release premium products for people to buy every year. But it makes no sense as a consumer to keep buying them cycle after cycle. I may get another two years out of this laptop, but my Mac has long since become useless to me.