However, I think it is fair to say that the majority of Apple fans often have a pretty frequent upgrade cycle. Consequently I don't think there are too many "long term customers" of Apple products in his sense of the word. I think Meaty is really going for "long term" customer as in - infrequent customer, keeping devices for long term.
If "people who keep old stuff" was what he was really going for, he's doing poorly at describing it, because I don't think that "long term customer" doesn't mean "customer who refuses to upgrade for geologic eras" among reasonable folks. And I certainly don't think an ecosystem where newer devices are generally preferred is a symptom of "bad engineering"--more "engineering decisions he doesn't like." Every MBP iteration has made me much more pleased to actually use the machine, and that's the core of what matters.
The only issue I ever had was with a balky videocard in the Mac Pro that would die after about 4 months of World of Warcraft. Apple was quick to replace the card twice without any troubles.
So everyone's mileage varies.
Since I recently upgraded to an SSD in the Mac Pro, and bumped up the memory to 32GB, I see no need to replace this machine until it suffers a serious mechanical failure. The only downside is that it'll forever be stuck running Lion.
This worked for me with my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 w/ an ATI HD5770 graphics card. I do have an issue where it often doesn't come back from sleep, so I never put it to sleep, but other than that it's been flawless so far. I haven't spent any time looking into the sleep issue, maybe it's a solvable problem.
By strictly hardware performance standards, the Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 did not deserve to lose support so soon, and are still more than adequate. Especially the 8-core versions, which have benchmarks higher than many 2012 Macs.
If you have a 4 core model: I researched putting in replacement CPUs a while back (but never went through with it). Replacing a CPU in a Mac Pro is not the easiest and is a bit of a pain from what I hear, but it is possible, and if you have 4 cores right now you can get a serious CPU performance boost with the right 8 core CPU upgrades (2 x 4-core CPUs, that is). There are many options that will will work. If you're interested, I can give you more details on which CPUs work.
Thanks for the link to the workaround. Hopefully it isn't something that will get broken with updates.
Nevertheless, I'm going to try to make sure I have a full backup before doing any major OS X updates. I also have both a Lion backup (as well as an old Snow Leopard backup) that I can boot up in case I need to.