Well, except for that 64-bit processor that was 2 years ahead of everyone else's
You mean the Intel Xeon? How was their Intel Xeon in any way special when compared to anyone else's Intel Xeon? Or do you mean the Intel i7, which was also the same i7 that was available to everyone else?
Uh, no. The A7 and A8. The ones that Apple developed themselves. The ones that Qualcomm dismissed as a gimmick while desperately trying to get out the door themselves and only just achieving this year.
Or the fingerprint sensor that works quite a lot better than any current competing models
And how many have you tried? Every iPhone user I know regards the fingerprint sensor as a nice "gee-whiz" addon but not anything important.
I've tried the ONE other that's on the market. On the face of it, it's a poor system, and much slower. The swipe action requires a lot more precision and a specific orientation. I've unlocked my iPhone upside down.
It seems like it's a triviality, but because of it, I can have a 15-ish digit passcode and unlock my phone and buy things from the appstore rather quickly. I feel like I'm in the dark ages every time I use my (3rd-Gen) iPad. It's a small change, but it's one that I quickly wanted on almost everything I owned. I'm not made of money, though, so replacing my iPad will have to wait.
Or the custom timing controller they built so they could release a 5k iMac for the same price that Dell is selling (a not-yet-available) a 5k monitor.
It's rather silly to compare an extant product to one you insist does not exist. More useful would be to note that the 5k iMac is a product with nearly no market and nearly no sales. In fact it is one of the only non-touchscreen all-in-one units on the market today.
Right, but for the same price as the Dell monitor, you can buy the iMac. It's like you get a computer for free.
Or the rather cleverly designed Mac Pro.
Clever in what way? We've seen cleverly designed workstations before that at least used novel hardware. Intel CPUs and GPUs in a fancy box are still Intel CPUs and GPUs.
The heat dissipation design is really clever. I had a PowerMac G5, and the bloody thing (while gorgeous--one of the loveliest industrial designs in the last 20 years) was insanely loud. I've worked with a few sound engineers in my time (I'm in the games industry) and they hate how loud the computers are.
I think between the longevity of their products and the high quality of the releases at the start of the generation, there's much less of a penalty to being an early Apple adopter than there ever was
I encourage you to think about that in more depth. Apple tends to push arguably the shortest generation time of any hardware vendor today. My non-apple laptop is 7 years old and runs fine. I don't know anyone who is currently using an apple laptop that is more than 3 years old, and it isn't because they did anything incredible hardware or software-wise in the past 3 years. Similarly their workstations - which you can't buy for less than $2,500 - also are designed to be replaced completely in bewilderingly short time spans.
I think you're misreading my statement. It used to be that buying Gen 1 of any Apple product was a recipe for disaster. You always waited for the next revision because the first one would have an irritating problem. Now, I feel like Gen 1 of Apple's hardware is a lot less worrisome from that perspective.
But to speak to your point, while Apple does frequent updates, they support old hardware for a long time. My iPhone got OS updates for four years--they're the only ones in the industry that do that. My 5 year old iMac is still getting OS updates. They're not really designed to be replaced quickly, it's just that their new designs are awfully good. I switched to Macs a few years ago specifically to AVOID the upgrade treadmill, and it's worked rather well.
And, to tie it back to the original thesis of this article, I feel like there's been a dip in the quality of the software that makes the longevity of the hardware a little less pertinent. Sure, I've got Yosemite running on my iMac, but the OS is mystifyingly crash-prone. It doesn't matter if my Mac is new or old, problems like that will drive you insane.