I usually bought a Mac every 1.5 years or so, because I liked being on the cutting edge. However, I am now still rocking a 2021 MacBook Pro 14" because it's still great. In half a year the model is about 3 years old. When I purchased it, it was close to 3000 Euro, and it has 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD.

If I'd sell it, I'd still get between 1000 and 1500 Euro. Let's say for the sake of the argument I get 1200 when it is three years old, then the yearly cost was 600 Euro. Which is... cheap for a tool that I use daily and my income depends on? I mean, if I had to drive by car to work, my yearly cost would be much more than 600 Euro.

I would readily agree that Apple overcharges for memory and SSD, but the amortized cost is not really large.

If you depend on this machine for living... You should have a spare machine. Way to recover data very fast if it breaks.... Way to fix it... It gets expensive pretty fast.

Also if you travel with Mac, you need to carry two laptops. There is no easy way to move NVME drive to new machine like with Pc laptops.

Ehm, why? What you are saying does not make sense at all. I do hourly incremental backups to fast blob storage. If my Mac breaks, I can pick up another one and be back up and running in no time. The other good thing is that it doesn't matter where I buy it or go for repairs, since Apple has great worldwide service.

Besides that I never had a Mac break down when I travel and I've owned MacBooks since 2007 and travelled a lot with them (including years of daily bike rides, including hilly terrain).

My MacBook is one of the products I literally never worry about.

Meanwhile, my Framework laptop from 2021 has twice the RAM and storage, was significantly cheaper, and runs an even more unix-like graphical environment.

But it doesn't have macOS. And that's where we started at: macOS is popular, because it's a great graphical UNIX.