When is a MacBook Pro considered at 'end of life' and in need of replacement?

In a standard corporate environment with PCs they are replaced approximately every 36 months on a revolving schedule.

In introducing Macs into the corporation, the IT department appears to be unable or unwilling to make a schedule for standard replacement, and thus the Mac users are getting upgraded ram and such, but their machines are older than the PCs.

What information should we be taking to the IT department to convince them to create such a schedule? Should we expect the schedule to be longer than typical PC replacement schedules, or the same? What aspects of a Mac make this a different equation than a PC?

In a typical corporate scenario you have to balance cost, resale value, and depreciation. This is all the accounting department really cares about, and that's who the IT department reports to. In general terms:

• Macs are more expensive than the equivalent PCs. In other words if you need to do X, Y, and Z and it can be done on either platform, the cost of the minimum machine that will do it is less for PC than Mac.
• Macs have a high resale value. After 2 years a PC will have dropped to a very low cost, but a similar Mac will still hold significant value.
• Macs depreciate slowly, while accounting typically uses one depreciation value for all computer equipment.

The combination of high resale value, but the same depreciation may tip the scales in your favor - or at least temper the initial cost of the machine. The machine may be partially or fully depreciated when it's sold, but it will sell for a higher cost than the PCs they would sell at the same time.

In most scenarios anything shorter than a 2 year replacement plan is going to cost the company more money than the value they'll get out of the machine, but anything longer than a 3 year plan will cost the company in terms of performance (employee waiting for the machine to catch up) than they'll lose buying a new machine and selling the old one.

It's probably a matter of debate how 'end of life' is defined; as one comment says, one reasonable definition is that it's at end of life when it no longer does what you want it to.

That said, another reasonable definition would seem to be whether the hardware in unsupported by the latest version of Mac OS. Here's the list of Macs which are supported by OS X. So if your MacBook Pro isn't on that list, you might be able to use that as justification to argue that it needs replacing!

Generally speaking, Apple supplies security fixes only for the current major OS X release (10.x) and the preceding one. So if security is of utmost importance to you, then a good rule of thumb is to replace the machine when the most recent version of OS X it can run is two major versions behind.

Today, that would be a machine that maxed out at 10.6, since 10.8 is the current version.

However, starting with 10.7, Apple has started to release major new versions every year, so they may begin extending security updates further back, otherwise you'd be out of luck after only two years. But there have only been two releases since then (10.7 and 10.8), so it hasn't been long enough yet to determine what they'll do when they get to 10.9 next year and 11.0 (or 10.10?) the year after.