The story reads true enough. The stuff about cars is definitely true. The "shaken" system really does make it a bad idea, financially, to keep a car more than a few years. We got a free Nissan laurel from my mother-in-law's company. It had over 100,000km on the clock but still ran pretty well. But the cost of just keeping it on the road was about 150,000 yen every couple of years, soon to be every year, for the shaken inspection and repairs alone. So we bought a new Mazda and they took the Laurel off our hands for a modest fee as it was virtually worthless on the second-hand market.
 
I've bought second-hand Macs a couple of times, and the main concern is the short guarantee (maybe 3 months if you're lucky). Again, it often costs more to have something repaired than to just replace it with a new one. Very wasteful.