It's all about product lifecycles. A decent & properly looked after, well-maintained & cared for, Apple Mac, is rated to last, at best, 8-10 years ( 8 for a laptop; 10 for a desktop ). The Intel-AMD M$ platforms, with M$ Win_Doze, are rated at best 4-6 years ( 4 for a laptop, 6 for a desktop ). No authoritative figures are available, for a Linux/BSD or similar, install on the Intel/AMD platforms, but observation seems to suggest that the lifecycle can be extended by at least 50%, then bringing it up towards the Mac standard. No publicly-released figures are available for standard UNIX installs, formerly adopted by the banks & governments, but boxes built in 1997, were still running in 2010, so a policy of gradually phased them out, from 2005 onwards, was adopted, as their durability was embarrassing in the extreme to the steering cabals, advocating " spend, spend, spend ", in order to continue to receive kickbacks from their suppliers. Product renewal policy is now governed by these cross-corporate fiscal factors of maintaining continued operational mutual-business viability, as IT departments lost control of the process to their higher-echelon policy staff, quite a while back, with accounting departments ( " bean counters " ), taking the blame for this shift in hidden priorities.
In a climate of economic recession due to over-extended corporatism, mass-indebtedness, and consumer spending retrenchment, profits are squeezed, & credit restraint by the banks, exacerbates the company desire to inflate share price, by methods which undercut traditional Value-for-Money product creation policies. The corporates have seized on the mobile phone phenomenon, adapting it to the creation of a cut-down version of decent, capable computers, like the Mac, to noddy computing, thinking to stimulate people's desire to purchase devices affording greater surface area than a mobile phone, to scratch convulsively at the itch of anxiety-driven personal computing .. Not that most of these purchases are necessary: genuine purchases, are for use in conditions in which laptops are still too bulky, or where cut-down capability is all that is required of a user to service a given fixed need.
Don't buy. They aren't meant to last ! It's probable that their component durability, is shorter than that in the proper desktops & laptops, together with a design lifecycle, rated in the vicinity of max. 3 years. Manufacturer publicity in the IT computer journalist reviews, encourages users to buy newer products, every 2 years. Shorter product usability lifecycles, enable increased cash flows, and, ideally, restore lost profit margins, forcing people to upgrade the entire unit, rather than individual components, as trained technicians do, on their servers, clients, & even their laptops ( damnably fiddly, but can be do-able ). If you want to get sucked into the morass of 2-year product renewal, then spend away, to indebtedness ! But as with mobile phones - which have the same 2-year manufacturers' recommended product lifecycle - it doesn't pay to go down that particular route, with the limited capability of these devices, rendering them a frustration, rather than an enabler, which buyers fondly imagine they will be.