A maxed out Mac has never been a good value proposition. (For non professionals) But in years past it wasn't a horrible one. The M series is really changing all that. Right now, you can get unupgradeable M1 MacBooks for the cost of a low-end laptop PC from the same year. Low-end PC laptops that can often be upgraded with cavernous hard drives, voluminous RAM, and even faster networking. Unlike the M series.

And on that decade of support. That's nothing special in PC space. I have a 2009 MacBook that became unsupported by Apple before the end of the 2010s. Microsoft technically stopped supporting the hardware........ last year. When they started following Apple's bad practice of forced obsolescence. The reason many aren't upgrading to windows 11.

For an SBC, Apple's M Hardware is pretty impressive if overpriced. The system I run the most is a 2015 skylake i7. I seriously contemplated a base M4 as an upgrade for a moment because of up front costs. But I just couldn't make long term ownership make sense. So I spent 300 dollars on a 16gb PCIE 5 9060XT for a PCIE 4 system instead. Far better compute and performance than the Apple APUs, even bottlenecked. And able to last and run comfortably to the next generation and a bit beyond. Something that base M4 could never do.

And I admit. I'm not the average user. I run 20 year old systems 24/7. They have this really neat trick. 2 years ago I maxed out the motherboard RAM for 20 bucks a pop. And doubled the core count for 40 each along with clock bumps. Something you can't do with Apple hardware anymore. Hell, even other ARM SBCs are more upgradeable in many ways. Apple has really lost a huge part of their value retention lately. And that's sad.