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The first Mac I bought, as opposed to use (a 1986 Mac Plus), was the first generation Intel iMac 24“.
Apple dropped it very quickly, it got updated up to Lion, which ran out of security updates in 2012, so about 5 years.
I had used Macs on and off over the years and my friends finally convinced me to buy one, as “they last longer than Windows PCs,” even though there are more expensive, they are cheaper in the long run. Well, the hardware lasted a long time, even if it was running Windows from 2012 through to 2018, when the motherboard died.
In 2010, I needed a laptop, so I looked at a MacBook Pro, but I wanted a quad core i7 processor and Blu-ray, neither of which zapple offered. A dual core i7 with DVD was twice as expensive as a quad core Sony with Blu-ray - the Sony is still going strong, running Mint Linux.
And in 2016, when I was looking at a new desktop, the prices of 24” displays and the general hardware had plummeted, but the iMac has dramatically increased in price, I went with a Ryzen 7 PC with much more power for a fraction of the price.
When the M1 Macs came out, I was very interested, but having been burnt by the Intel switch and the first generation being prematurely abandoned, I was hesitant, but eventually bought a Mac mini M1. I’m very pleased with it - it is nearly as fast as the Ryzen 7, but uses a fraction of the electricity to obtain that performance, a major factor with the current energy prices - but that first experience of owning a Mac still leaves me hesitant, when it comes to buying Macs.
I’ve had Macs since 1999. My feeling was that the two conversions were fundamentally different. At the time of the M1 announcement, Apple was invested in their ARM architecture. The M1 chip was an offshoot of the A14 chip, and that A-series design was the 17th iteration of Apple-designed chips. Apple already knew how to make great processors, and the M1 was essentially tweaking of Apple Silicon features for a macOS architecture. Everything from the June 2020 architecture announcement to the Developer Transition Kit delivered that summer to the 3 computers announced in November 2020 just screamed a deep commitment to this architecture. I thought Apple had shown restraint in coping with several years of mediocre Intel product releases; they waited until they were ready to commit to the conversion to Apple Silicon.
IMHO, the biggest failure in the conversion has been the lack of enthusiasm of developers for the Mac Catalyst program: running iOS apps native on macOS Apple Silicon computers. It’s never worked flawlessly, and many developers are reluctant to allow their iOS/iPadOS apps to run on macOS. Marco Arment has explained why on the ATP podcast: he gets many 1-star reviews for Overcast from users with a promise to change to 5-stars if [some random macOS bug] gets fixed. Marco knows he will get those dings, but, bless him, he ignores those users’ demands. Most iOS apps I use on my Mac run just fine. iOS app Knotwords pegs 2 high-performance CPUs on my Mac but runs fine; I simply view this glitch as inducement to solve the puzzles rapidly 
. I ascribe glitches like this to Apple; I wish they would have a major initiative to #!$$ fix them. I think that Mac Catalyst apps could be a far more powerful carrot for the Mac platform if Apple would figure out how to encourage both indie and corporate devs to make app availability ubiquitous.
@big_D, the pain of getting burned by past incidents is strong; I sympathize. My feeling is that Apple will indeed bend over backwards to keep those M1 Macs compatible for a very very long time. I think that longevity was a fundamental goal in the DNA of the chip design of the first M1 design. And, as you note, the power-efficient design is marvelous both for less heat and less electrical power.
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