I don't discredit the disappointment in the recent Apple laptop announcements, but I do think that paying a premium price for a genuinely solid machine is reasonable, even if that machine doesn't have a rapid change in features. I've never had any other laptop last over 5 years without any major problems.
And it is also hard for me to deny that after lugging around a heavier laptop for awhile, having a light Macbook Pro definitely is easier when on the go.
You don't say, but, were they higher-end Dell laptops or not?
I've got an 6-year-old Dell Studio 17 still going strong, which cost about $1,000 when I bought it. I recently replaced it solely because I've learned that waiting until a machine is completely dead to replace it produces stress, when you end up having to go to Best Buy or equivalent and just buy whatever they may happen to have lying around, which is not what I'm looking for. The battery lasts about 10 minutes tops right now but I never bought it for its battery life anyhow. It's in pretty good shape for 6 years old. The screen's doing something weird with diagonal streaks developing in the top and bottom, but it's still perfectly usable at the moment.
On the other hand, the bottom-of-the-line Dell stuff is crap I'd hardly expect to last two years. It depends on what you buy.
As an owner of a 2011 MacBook Pro with a recently replaced battery, I don't believe you. We either don't share the same understanding of "all day", "serious activity", "without a charge", or "goes".
I can easily make it through a full work day doing this without plugging in the machine.
If your battery runs out on the macbook, you're just done.
If this had been a macbook update I don't think there would have been as much a backlash, but a macbook pro is not the same thing as a macbook in terms of expectations for ports or power
The only reason it's getting any positive feedback from anyone is because it's Apple and people are charitably imagining that software developers are going to dedicate resources to support a doodad that doesn't even exist on 90% of apple machines (and only ~5% of notebooks/desktops are Apple in the first place!).
And this is hardly the first Apple release that has been met with complaints, even within the pro notebook category.
I also think Apple expectations are kinda low. I think everyone is used to Apple and just deal with their oddities and questionable decisions. The same way Windows guys just shrug and upgrade to Win10 without question. People don't want to learn new platforms and just want something similar to what they had, so they'll make a lot of excuses to avoid the pain of migrating platforms.