Because prices? Have you seen how much Apple products cost these days?

Also, M1/M2 are perfectly fine and capable hardware. It's hard to justify the upgrade outside some artificial constraints Apple would bring in with a macOS update.

I have both an M1 Max and an M4 Max and out of habit am still on the former. The performance is still substantial enough that is quite usable.

I'm very surprised you feel it's a given that every SWE at every company has the perk of getting a new machine as quickly as every 2 years, I doubt it's justified by the productivity increases of just 2 years of hardware improvements.

I am on an M1 macbook pro. My company will upgrade me anytime I want.

I haven’t asked because my current laptop is more than ok.

it's pretty common to be running a 4 year old computer in most companies I've worked.

I think they plan for 3 years but in reality it becomes closer to 4 (because they don't plan the refresh during the actual hardware refresh cycle, so you'll end up with a computer that was released in September the year before in like August the year after).

I've never worked anywhere that replaced my computer after 2 years.

You’d be surprised. I got an absolute boat anchor of a 2019 MacBook when I started a job in early 2022. I requested a new one in late 2023 because company policy is to refresh laptops every 4 years - whoever was on the other end of my support ticket interpreted the policy as four years from issuance and denied me.

Not everyone is at $CORP. I upgraded from M1 to M4 and probably won't upgrade until the gap is worth it (M7?). Besides the memory increase I barely notice the improved cpu/gpu speed.

Sounds extremely wasteful to me. What's a new machine going to offer than a 2 year old machine doesn't?

Things were painful in the Intel era but I’m on M1 Mac and I’d have a really hard time justifying a request for an upgrade. I absolutely detested my old Intel MacBook (touchbar era) and couldn’t wait to get rid of it.

I run bloated slow electron apps and chrome all day, generally with profligate usage patterns, and things hardly ever slow down even with corporate antimalware. Sometimes I forget about having left Windows VMs running in the background.

Anyway, why would my company spend $2500+ every two years to turn instant into instant?