Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells

I have been thinking about Apple and EPEAT for a while now. Why not make MacBooks with removable batteries etc that are not outdated for governments etc that need it?

The 13" Air can often be had for $799 which makes it that much more appealing.

I have an i7 2012 13" Pro loaded up with 8GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. It's a pretty potent machine but the screen resolution holds it back somewhat - I wish they had put a 1440x900 screen in it like the Air.

The short version of this is that there is a lot of money to be made from enterprises by selling them outdated technology because enterprises are almost always slow to adopt new technology. That's how Dell and Microsoft Sharepoint still make a lot of money.

It's not necessarily a bad thing when taking into account the economics of training IT personnel and the added costs of supporting cutting edge technologies. But I don't think many individual buyers would argue that the 2012 MBP is a better computer in pretty much any way than a 2015 MBP with Retina display.

One additional reason it still makes sense as a product: last 3-4 years have been... Quite underwhelming, from a CPU power perspective. A little bit of power efficiency, which does have its place on a laptop, but other than that, hardly anything noticeable in day to day use.

Intel is clearly not feeling the heat from competition and their pricing, minimal improvement and feature fragmentation clearly show it.

Giving up on AMD ever going back to making them feel a bit of heat again.

So wishing for Apple to release an ARM MacBook, just to put some fear into Intel, and return some health to the market.

I'm writing this from a late 2008 Macbook (the first Unibody Macbook, and the direct ancestor of the Macbook the article talks about). On this laptop, I finished school, develop, Photoshop, store all my pictures/videos/music. It is my only machine. It's great. I'm about to purchase my third battery for it (they decline dramatically at around 1300 loadcycles); replacement is very simple (there's a door on mine), even though Apple no longer sells replacement batteries. I've maxed the ram to 8GB, put in a 256GB SSD.

So what happens when I finally purchase a new laptop, use it for 5 years, and Apple no longer supports replacing the battery? Then I'm spudgering out glued-in batteries with iFixit's iOpener. And I'd eventually like to upgrade to 512GB, but $700 up from the base price of the 13" Macbook Pro is not how I want to do it... I'd rather wait and upgrade it myself. Will OWC make the SSD card to do it? Hopefully. It's just... disappointing. I'd like a way to get the bulletproofness (just over 7 years on this one without issue) of a solid aluminum unibody but not give up the upgradeability.

Perhaps I'm a dinosaur.

Guess I'll shoot for another 3 years with this thing until the base Macbook Pros are a significant upgrade. Oh well.