I've had pretty good luck with buying a new ASUS laptop every year or so and then giving the old ones to my family. They definitely don't last as long as a Mac, but the specs are often comparable and I prefer to run Windows/Linux in a VM than OSX.

Not sure if this is a good mindset to have, but I feel less worried about lugging a ~$1000 laptop around town compared to a $3000 Macbook. It feels a little less like a priceless object and more like a "disposable" tool (as disposable as a $1000 object could ever be).

Also the keyboard is perfect and isn't the Mac's, which I can't really deal with.

Currently I'm rolling with a Zenbook UX430U, primarily because it was the one with 16 gigs of ram.