As a very longtime Apple/Mac user, that is sadly no longer the case. With nothing user upgradeable anymore, I've noticed Apple products are no longer holding the same value as they used to.

I have the luxury of being able to upgrade my iPhone and MacBook every couple years as I write them off as a business expense. I made sure to take care of them so they are in perfect condition for resale when it was time for the new one. Where they used to resell at roughly 80%, that's now down to 60-70%.

What are you talking about? Other stuff still works too, they just don't get official updates. If the phones can be flashed with a new ROM, there's a good chance they still get community updates years later.

That won't matter though, since the EU is going to force 5 years of support.

Apple products get this reputation because when support officially drops, it drops hard. Like, you can’t even use it the same way you did when you bought it, because the services that it needs no longer support the last software that runs. Other platforms that lose support fail more gradually. A lot of this is due to support costs and Apple’s retail presence. If an app stops working on a Samsung phone that’s EOL, the best you can do is go to their forums and complain. With an iPhone, you can go to an Apple store and talk to someone directly. Much better for the business to just have a hard cut-off for when something is EOL.

Except Apple has already been found guilty of throttling old devices to try to force users to upgrade. They've been doing this for a long time, but they've only been ordered to pay a settlement in recent years for doing it with their iPhones.

But honestly the older Macbook Airs don't need to be throttled, they just need the old universal dongles to crap out, IIRC those things were useless without the dongle to connect all your peripherals .

I'd say any product, including Android and Apple, are good if not for planned obsolescence. We've seen it before many times: manufacturer makes a product that lasts for decades, loses money because they can't sell anymore.

I had my android phone for 9 years previously and my current one is going great. The only reason why I upgraded was because I wanted a better GPS signal while travelling. I also have vintage radios from 1930s and they work well after replacing the parts.

My OnePlus 3T from 2016 still works perfectly fine, I'd say a normal 3 also would. That's a more than 7 years old phone. Good Android phones don't randomly stop working, except the cheap ones that are already underpowered at launch.

Everything from three decades ago still works. That was before corpos got modern efficiency down. Apple was over priced crap then, it is over priced crap now, only it lasts only two years before the glued in garbage starts to melt over the next two.