From among the Elektron boxes which had the most powerful CPU and/or RAM. Most interested to know/guess longevity of the flagship boxes (say which is the flag bearer now anyway - Octatrack?). Does all Digi and Model boxes use same hardware innards for their respective series?
Curious topic. I think none of the boxes have longevity issues. They seem to be engineered with ability to do everything they set out for as an instrument. OT is a decade old and its still a flagship.
If you are wondering which instrument will have most new features introduced however, my bet would be on ST. Its been less than a year and it already got everyone song mode and some new sound machines for itself. I can imagine it getting lots of love for years to come. 
(oh and also ST circuitboard is stacked 
)
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Octatrack has the most RAM (80mb), but then it can also stream from the card, which more than makes up for that.
I think most of the boxes have Coldfire CPUs in them, which aren’t particularly powerful compared to modern computer processors, but don’t come with the problem of being obsolete every 12 months or so. If I remember rightly, Digitone has two Coldfires and Digitakt has one
For hardware, unlike with computers, longevity is based on continued availability of parts rather than the specification of it’s CPU or RAM.
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They’ll keep going for many decades. Might be a few parts replacements along the way. CPUs wont be one them, RAM is mostly irrelevant give the tiny size of sysex files, and yeah octatrack has a CF card… and you can make back ups across all machines.
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Fun fact: the lineage of the Coldfire cpu can be traced right back to the Motorola 68k used in the Atari ST and Amiga. Compared to a modern processor they are extremely underpowered but doing a single task with no other overheads they work perfectly. A good example is you’re unlikely to notice the lack of processing power in a microwave, tv or washing machine - they all have embedded CPU’s that are fit for the purpose of the device.
Flagship, I’m going to say A4 - because I have one and am biased! (…it’s probably the Octa though.)
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Haha, I just say octatrack because I have one… and its bigger than a digi.
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I’m going to remember that analogy, thanks!
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Computers or smartphones become obsolete due to software developpement. If softwares doesn’t change, a computer works for decades. My old AMD Duron 800 still works, it’s just useless.
The only pieces “dying faster” are the wear part, like old hard drive or switch button on elektron machine.
But I think you will be dead before the buttons of the elektron machines.
Sidenote: Smartphones are a poor example. Companies like Apple have “planned obsolescence” where annual software updates use code to reduce usable battery capacity and needlessly fill the phones memory with crap so you will upgrade. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it has been publicly admitted.
Unlike Apple, Elektron are not poisoning the code of updates to render legacy products defunct.
In the sphere of non-SOC driven hardware, it’s hard to use the normal computing analogy for obselesense.
When you have a device with resources directed toward a specific set of tasks, you don’t need a large amount of threads in the cpu or extreme performance for memory and onboard storage.
It seems that the chips chosen for the elektron boxes are already overpowered for what they do.
So, I will say that these little machines will be 15 year updatable, which is way longer than you could ever expect for a piece of synth/sampler hardware.
If you google Digitakt pcb, model sample pcb you will see the coldfire cpu on both.
The picture are a bit blurry but it look like they share the same coldfire cpu, not able to see if it’s exactly the same or a variant because of image quality.
It’s also possible that the model are clocked at a lower frequency because it does use 6 track only and don’t need all that power.