I have an 8 year old MacBook Air. Still getting updates, still working perfectly well. Best 1000$ ever spent on a PC. Zero seconds invested in configuring or setting up anything.
At the end of the day, buying a Computer is a tradeoff. A lot of people would very happily tradeoff freedom for other values if the value proposition is good.
I purchased a MBA 4 years ago (i5/8GB/256GB) and it is by far the best investment in technology I have made. Ultra reliable, amazing battery life, light weight and nice to type on. At home it's plugged into a monitor/kb/mouse like a desktop. I like the tight software and hardware integration, which extends to an iPhone and iPad.
I have a 2013 13” MBP that I have not being nice to (to put it mildly). It’s working great.
I have a 2013 15” MBP that I babied and kept in immaculate condition. It also worked great until some RAM failed a couple of weeks ago. It’s a brick now
If Apple were to release low level documentation and source code for hardware it considers obsolete to help developers support it, it would not effect their business other than getting a lot of goodwill.
it may not affect them at a pennies-in-billions level, but those pennies are owned by a few patent holders whose heirs will profit many times over in the foreseeable future
why? I doubt those obsolete chipsets will be used by anyone else, or anyone will be particularly motivated to shell out a lot of money for access to schematics.
At the end of the day, buying a Computer is a tradeoff. A lot of people would very happily tradeoff freedom for other values if the value proposition is good.