Apple is kind of in their own price-point which is (potentially) justified by their quality. The main alternative is "buy something cheaper".

Is their any laptop that is even in the same ballpark on a performance-battery-life plot?

There's plenty of terrible hardware out there, indeed. Personally I prefer Thinkpads. I've owned a lot of shitty laptops over the years, though the Macbook Pro(2013/2014 retina) is the only one that's managed to become permanently dead as yet. The others I've been able to repair to some extent. I've had my Thinkpad for six years now and it's still going strong. It's not even a powerful model, I just run pretty low-overhead stuff on it and test the stuff I code remotely on my home workstation through a vpn. It's sturdy as hell though. 6 years of not-so-gentle use and no accidental damage has happened. The Macbook display was damaged and useless after 3 months, because it was dropped, once. Of course it was deemed user error, because it was. But man, I expect a bit more sturdyness from a $1400 laptop built in metal by a company that is supposed to deliver "superior quality" at a hefty premium.

I expect to keep my Thinkpad for another 5 years at least. But I might switch to Framework at some point if they can match the Thinkpad build quality. For laptops I value sturdyness and repairability over all other considerations, because I'm clumsy as hell. Apple products are far too fragile for me and far less sturdy than they look.

> Apple products are far too fragile for me and far less sturdy than they look

Amen.

I really like my thinkpad and basically all my family has second hand thinkpads, but let’s not pretend that they are flawless — their last few generations of intels have terrible throttling issues.

Sure, that could be, I don't have any issues, though my thinkpad also just has an i5 in.

"What's your foolproof buyer method ?"

Reading trustworthy test sites, before buying anything expensive. Which has gotten a bit harder, due to LOTS of paid content, but it still works, if you know how to spot the signs of a bad site.

Before I buy a laptop, I pretend I accidentally put my fist through the screen, and shadowbox the process of replacing the panel.

For example with Thinkpad that meant finding a compatible panel based on specs they publish about all their models, then finding a teardown and rebuild video published on the Lenovo website for the model.

I was really interested in an m1 laptop but I tried my process with it and all research pointed to "send it in to apple care" which I don't want to do because I know how to use a screw driver and order parts, that should be enough.

Yeah, display, battery, and storage replacement being doable is absolutely key to me. But even more importantly, the display needs to be well shielded, especially if it's an LCD panel, because with those one crack is enough to make the entire display unusable. The Macbook I had was very vulnerable if it fell and landed in its side. It's because Apple prioritise a thin bezel over durability, I think.

>Self Service Repair is intended for individuals with the knowledge and experience to repair electronic devices. If you are experienced with the complexities of repairing electronic devices, Self Service Repair provides you with access to genuine Apple parts, tools, and repair manuals to perform your own out-of-warranty repair.

https://support.apple.com/self-service-repair

Is that the thing where they mail you a pelican box of parts?