And? What's the problem? Does everyone need every single product to be brand new and different every year? Who cares if it's 1000 or 5000 days on the market?
Really depends on the product and whether better tech is now available. AirPods, HomePod etc. will need replacing if/when there are new audio formats they can't support or some major advance in speaker design... The only beef with Airpods Max seems to be that they still use Lightning - but then Apple only started moving iPhones to Lightning last year, so that's hardly overdue (c.f. the Magic peripherals, which are principally for Macs that have
never had Lightning and were launched after Apple started adopting USB-C).
This article seems a bit "so what?" - there have been worse cases in the past - pretty much
every incarnation of the Mac Pro, the 2014 Mac Mini, the iMac Pro continued long after better tech was available - even in other Macs, let alone the industry as a whole.
To the AirPort idea, I will add in Time Capsule. Yes, I know there are other devices to use for Time Machine, but it was a slick device to encourage users to keep good backups.
I think that the reason Apple dropped AirPort and Time Capsule is that they no longer have anything distinctive to offer - when they first appeared, WiFi on other systems was a bit of a dumpster fire to use, and Mac file sharing really worked best with AFP rather than Windows' SMB protocol. However, the Mac had to - and did - evolve to be able to work seamlessly with regular WiFi routers and SMB file servers... and thrid party routers/servers evolved to have point'n'drool web interfaces, so there's really nothing left for which Apple can charge a premium.
Yes, but inflation is constantly eating away at the value of money, so the $549 now is actually less in value than it was 1360 days ago. That's economics
That depends whether you're looking at IT costs as a proportion of your total income as a matter of historical curiosity or comparison shopping between different IT equipment options available right now.
Inflation is a very crude 'average' measure that has never really applied to the IT market. The expectation, developed over the last 50 years, is that as time passes you will get significantly more powerful hardware every year or so without seeing much change in the sticker price. (e.g. the dollar price of a base iMac is the same today as it was in 1998) Also - for any supplier other than Apple - it is pretty common for the "street price" of a tech product to rapidly drop to a fraction of the original "list price" as time passes. (E.g. the Samsung 5k display, which frequently gets plugged on this site).
If you look at something like the Pro XDR display, it can only justify its price because you can count the competing products on the fingers of one foot. Dell have a couple of competitors - a ~$2500 6k display and a ~$4000 8k display, neither of which AFAIK have the XDR's local dimming features - and I'm not sure if th 8k is even Mac compatible since it neads two DisplayPort cables (and, in any case, more isn't always better, because 6k@32" hits the MacOS UI's 220ppi "sweet spot").
A far more egregious case from the past was the 2010-2016 27" 1440p Cinema/Thunderbolt display, that never saw a price cut - when it came out, 1440p was bleeding edge, but by 2014 there were plenty of cheaper 1440p displays around and even
Apple was shipping 5k screens in iMacs for the cost of a Thunderbolt display + Mac Mini. (To add insult to injury, ISTR the original non-TB Cinema version stayed on the market for years at the same price as the TB version that appeared a year later... Everymac has it discontinued in 2011, but I'm pretty sure it stayed at least until the 2013 Trashcan came out, as it was the only Apple option for the tower Mac Pro).
