If they had instead bought a $700 laptop 8 years ago, they likely would have had to upgrade several times by now.

800 dollar laptops today are more durable than M1 with max 16 GB of RAM at double the price, because their RAM is actually upgradable most of the time.

It's so funny see Mac fans argue about everything and its contrary that it's worth the obvious down votes.

"800 dollar laptops today are more durable ... because their RAM is ... upgradable"

I think the word durable has more of a connotation of being resistant to damage rather than meaning "able to be used for a long time".

And let’s be honest, objectively apple’s products will beat the rest in longevity hands down. In case of mobiles, it is unfortunately not even a contest, but even an 8 years old mac will run fine with OSX.

If you ignore their macs from 2016 to 2020. All of those years have keyboards and display connectors that are very prone to failure, and they had negative thermal headroom, so they throttle down more and more as dust gets lodged in them.

I don't own any Apple products.