I'm curious why anyone would buy an Apple laptop with all the stories about unreliability in this thread...

I've had 2 laptops in the last ~11 or so years. A ThinkPad (trucked along worry-free for years) and a relatively cheap Acer Swift 3 (AMD Ryzen APU) which I still use to this day, worry-free. I don't think I've ever actually taken any device in for repair, ever, yet somehow in this thread there's a ton of anecdotes.