I used buy a $700 Windows laptop every 18 months in the 2000s. Then I got fed up with them just falling apart and switched to Macbooks. My 2013 purchase is still alive and being used by the kids.

Yeah, the quality of PC laptops has improved but that really just means you can get closer to equivalent quality at equivalent pricing. I've heard people claim to have saved a ton but every single time I used one there was some noticeable quality decrease, which I find kind of refreshing as a reminder that the market does actually work pretty well.

Did you treat the MB differently because you paid more? If so, that may have yielded longer life in addition to quality design, etc.

Not really. The difference in build quality was night and day; metal vs. plastic, keyboard that doesn't flex, etc.

Did you buy a macbook for $700? That was a pretty low price back then which meant you were buying devices made to a price. Buying a Macbook is one solution, another would have been to spend more money on a higher quality Wintel system.

No, it was around $1100 IIRC, maybe as much as $1300.

Right, so when spend twice as much you wind up with a better device. I think this might be only tangentially related to the fact that it was an Apple product, rather, you weren't purchasing the cheapest available device.

Ten years ago Apple was by far the highest quality laptop manufacturer. There was essentially no other option back in the early 2010s. Even now laptops with a "retina" display are not always easy to find for other manufacturers. In retrospect, that was probably the killer feature which induced me to switch.

In the 2000s, I went through a wide variety of PC laptops (Lenovo, Toshiba, Dell, Alienware, Sony, etc.) all within the range of $1200-$6500 and they all died within 3 years (except for the cheapest one which was a Lenovo with Linux). Some died within a year.

When my first Macbook lasted for more than 3 or 4 years I was surprised that I was upgrading before it died. I went through many upgrades with almost zero issues(one HDD failure, one battery failure). I still have a 2012 Macbook Pro that I've since installed Linux on.

When I bought the first touchbar Macbook (late 2015?) I spent around $6k maxing out the options, and I was surprised at how totally trash it was. Hardware QC issues were shocking: particles under the screen from manufacturing, keys stuck within the first hour of usage, external monitor issues, touchbar issues...

I haven't bought a laptop since.