The lifespan of a laptop is not tied to a replaceable battery - if you buy a new laptop because you have lost 20% battery capacity, then you are making an unsound financial decision.
A laptop does not really degrade much apart from cosmetic wear or physical damages - instead, what the same amount of money can get you changes, and at some point you feel like that cost has been amortized and that the gap between back then and now has increased enough to justify a new purchase. The only reason M1's would last longer in that regard would be stagnation on Apple's behalf.
Same with how the PC market had stagnated with minimal generational improvements until both Ryzen and M1 shook things up in interesting ways.
> The lifespan of a laptop is not tied to a replaceable battery
This applies to me. My laptop is 10 years old, has 16G memory and is running Linux. I have replaced battery once before (and definitely need a new battery again now).
In my experience it's: battery goes bad after 2-3 years and then you replace the laptop after 5 years because you are tired of using your laptop as a desktop computer because it shuts down as soon as you unplug it.
Sure after 2-3 years you still have some charge, but it's more like 1 hour when browsing the Internet and not the 6-7 hours that it had originally.
I might just be buying shitty laptops though. Do your phone batteries also last 5 years?
Does anyone else not just buy a new battery? Fresh install, NVMe SSD, a clean fan and fresh thermal paste, maybe a new WiFi card. Makes a laptop feel new again.
You forgot more ram. OTOH, I've not reinstalled a machine in 15+ years for perf reasons. As I upgrade the machine, what has killed the last few desktop machines has been MS dropping support. Or in the case of linux laptops the fact that I get tired of the eventual tape and bailing wire nature of 5+ year old machines full of dings, dents and broken ports or the CPU perf has finally gotten to the point where I can get >4x perf uplift.
A laptop does not really degrade much apart from cosmetic wear or physical damages - instead, what the same amount of money can get you changes, and at some point you feel like that cost has been amortized and that the gap between back then and now has increased enough to justify a new purchase. The only reason M1's would last longer in that regard would be stagnation on Apple's behalf.
Same with how the PC market had stagnated with minimal generational improvements until both Ryzen and M1 shook things up in interesting ways.