the switch from ppc to intel definetly contributed to the fact that my powerbook only held up ~8 years
Outside of the silky OS and tight Linux coupling, it has been a joy to buy computers (albeit at a premium) that last more than 2 years.
I still have a 2009 iMac that is perfectly fine for everything except iOS development (due to an Xcode OS minimum) and a 2015 MBP for that. While my new work 16 MBP is a performance beast compared to the 2015 MBP, I can certainly be productive and expect to be for years to come with my personal kit.
The only component I've upgraded was a graphics card, but that's only because I play games on this PC. Otherwise, my old GTX680 would have still been fine.
Yes, my Thinkpad T420 still does. Don't compare consumer-grade $300 laptops/PCs to Apple hardware that costs $2,500+, please.
A modern Windows 10 is also still able to run applications written in 1999 and even earlier. Apple only supports the last 3 releases of macOS which puts the burden on the developers that often don't even support the applications anymore.
There are many reasons to dislike Windows(-based PCs) but your argument is very, very weak.
If you're the type of person who doesn't put your hardware through a beating, I find that name-brand consumer PCs to be fairly durable. But like you said, they are obviously not as nice as Apple hardware.
Another thing about PCs is that you don't get forced obsolescence from Mac OS upgrades that stop supporting old hardware that is still usable, outside of having a weak gpu.
There are plenty of reasons to hate on Windows(-based machines) but what would they know.
Maybe it is just small sample size, but my mil purchased an HP consumer laptop for ~$600 when I purchased my first MBP in 2010. Hers barely lasted 3 years for hardware and software reasons. My chugged on for 6 years. While the cost per year was similar... the utility was not.
I hope it is better, but during the 1990-2010 period when I ran Windows based systems they inevitably would come to a crawl after a year of use. I would have to completely rebuild them, reinstall the OS and all programs from scratch to return them to utility.
I honestly don't think I have ever done this with an Apple product.
That 2011 MBP is easily the most short lived computer (and one of the more expensive) I have ever had, and I've had >2X more Windows computers than I have had Macs.
Having said that, I would still say that the 2012 15" MBPs were the pinnacle of MBPs -- for me --. I know that a lot more people prefer the 2015 MBPs, but thin and light is not tops on my priority list.
But here's what the real problem was. Apple pretended the problem didn't exist for a very long time.
There was a huge thread on the Apple Support site related to this issue that was literally hundreds of pages long that spanned over a year. People were resorting to baking their logic boards in an oven to fix the issue, albeit temporarily.
Many people eventually gave up and wrote off the hardware before Apple finally acknowledged the issue with a repair order. This happened to me. I had the logic board replaced once already while under AppleCare (and the issue came back a few months later, but there was no point in constantly having the logic board replaced with another having the same design flaw). Just before my Applecare lapsed, it died. I wasn't going to pay $500+CAD for another defective board.
I was lucky I kept my unit around long enough when the repair order (recall) was issued. It still ended up dying a while later.
Apple had many options to make their affected users whole. They make enough money that they could have replaced everyone's 2011 model with a 2012 model (even a refurb would have been OK) which had none of those issues. Had they done that, I'd probably still be a Mac user (using that very same 2012 model) right now.
In the end, that experience completely soured me from Apple.
Yes. Or twice that time for that matter. And they aren't stuck on some outdated OS version.
Yes? I built a ~$1500 PC in 2013 and still use it for non-work purposes. I did put Elementary OS on it though instead of Windows 10, and it's starting to show its age running some newer games but it works just fine.