My opinion about 10 years ago (most likely affected by inflation now) was that a laptop costs roughly $100/year. When I had an inexpensive $300 laptop, it lasted about 3 years. In that time I opened the case multiple times to fix problems, usually involving overheating. Towards the end the laptop was unusably slow and unable to play full-screen video. When I bought a $1000 laptop, it so far has lasted 8 years and counting. I opened it once to upgrade the memory, and once again to simply tighten screws to reduce the chassis flex that had gotten worse over time.

Failures are random and infrequent if you start with good hardware. Sadly, in my experience a lot of cheap laptops do not come with reliable hardware.

My buddy will be delighted to know that his $4700 MacBook is good to go until 2069

It's less about price than about grades of laptop.

For example, if you buy Lenovo, the Idea* laptops will be junk laptops, while Think* will be pretty good quality. There are sub-grades within both. With Dell, there are usually several series with names changing periodically. In the Latitude series, the first number corresponded to quality when I last bought. 3xxx is junk. 5xxx is decent. 7xxx is good. There are similar divisions in their consumer lines.

It's possible to find very good reliable laptops if you're willing to live with last years' model, and especially with off-lease premium laptops. Corporate environments will often lease a thousand premium laptops for three years, not stress them very hard, and then they're sold for a song as there's a corporate-wide refresh.