Depends on how you are defining "worth" here. They are the only devices "worth" their price as evidenced by how well they hold their value and how much consumers are willing to pay for them. They are not "worth" the high price if you are valuing the internals (what GPU, processor, memory, HD you get).

I've ended up with multiple iPads over the years despite my best efforts. They definitely do stop working after a while. I've also noticed MacBooks get burning hot doing a video conference for more than 15 minutes. And I'm not a hardcore gamer, but my kids play Minecraft and it's fine by glitchy.

Compared to the Acer I bough for $700 with a basic Nvidia card and upgradeable memory that can handle everything I throw at it. My last Acer ran fine for almost 6 years but I dropped it one too many times.

Now do me this favor: take your experience and opinion, and compare it to others. How many people share this with you? If the Acer was just that substantially better in terms of value and build quality, why isn't Acer the #1 laptop in the US? Why do so many companies, organizations, and developers not share this take with you? What may you be missing?

hackintosh's aren't all that hard to build

Hackintosh are hard to build, by any reasonable definition, even for an average HN users. It's possible some people find that easy, but surely it is much harder than following an even medium difficulty tutorial.

Have you tried building one before? I built mine for the first time in February with 0 prior experience with such things and followed this guide: https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-... If you're doing a config with a motherboard that's well used you can generally find the right configs to use. If you're using something not often used, you'll have trouble with the initial setup but once you get over that initial setup trouble in my experience everything will work and stay fine.

There are also lots of helpful people in the /r/hackintosh subreddit and discord if you run into troubles.

I was debating between building a hackintosh and buying the new MacBook pro and I can say 100% it was worth it.

I'm now first time using Mac due to my project. It works fine, but I do prefer Linux for development. Hackintosh probably makes sense if you're stuck on some Mac software though.

Ironically I'm using Mac over Linux because I want to use parallels to run a windows application that I must use. I tried using VMware for a while but it drove me insane that everytime I switched workspaces it would exit fullscreen.