The bottom line is that Apple, like most (if not all) tech companies, has apparently embraced planned obsolescence with a passion. That the company can get away with hobbling even its expensive professional line means there is no incentive not to hobble.
Apple gets away with this. It's really that simple. You can write to them all you like, but not only is planned obsolescence here to stay, it is speeding up. The halcyon days of the Mac Plus (which was sold for many years and which had OS support all the way through 7.5.5) are long long gone.
Apple under Jobs was heavily into PO. Closed systems. Limited expansion. The first Mac, for instance, only came with a paltry 128K of RAM and no hard disk support. The Lisa was quickly orphaned, too. As far as I know, the first Mac wasn't expandable in terms of RAM. According to testimony from the Mac team, Jobs even demoed the Mac with a 512K prototype—instead of the 128K one that was going on sale to customers. This was so it would have enough RAM to run the speech synthesis that so impressed the crowd. The original iMac was a relateively disposable system, too.
Now, we've recently seen the iPad 1 orphaned after a short period of time. Lion and Mountain Lion are shortening the length of time OS X will support machines. The idea is buy and replace, buy and replace, the faster the better. If you don't like a bug in the OS, then you'll have to upgrade when the latest version comes out. I was told that back when I called Apple about the noisy optical drive in OS X 10.1.5 on my Powerbook G4. OS 9 played audio CDs at the correct slow rate, so the drive was quiet. OS X wouldn't, and made listening to music with a disc awful. Apple told me to wait until 10.2 comes out. It did, and it didn't fix the problem.
This "upgrade upgrade upgrade" mentality isn't so new. It's really part of the Apple-under-Jobs strategy. Jobs knew that most people will just fork over the cash for the latest thing, even if it only lasts 5 minutes. The strategy for a company is to see how much money it can squeeze out of its customers. Selling them equipment that isn't running at full specs is a clever idea. Unfortunately, some of us lack the funds to keep chasing the full-replacement-as-upgrade wagon.
I have two Macbook "Pros" (4,1) with the unnecessary SATA 1 bottleneck and fast Vertex 2 ssds. Both of the optical drives failed years ago, because they were shoddy. Apparently that's a "known issue". So, I have these two computers that haven't had optical drives for years but also are apparently bottlenecked supposedly because of the great necessity of supporting the PATA optical port. Apple took some steps in the right direction with the Macbook Pro. The unibody models are much easier to upgrade. But, it's really wrong to leave the ICH8-M owners out in the cold. A simple firmware update would go a long way toward creating some happier customers. But, landfills and stock holders demand that we replace otherwise fine machines. The "the machine is one year old, so it's so old you can't complain" mentality (literally what people were saying in response to this criticism in another forum in a 2009 thread) is what's here to stay.
One last gripe: These "Pro" Macs' panels don't even manage to cover the sRGB color space.
