> People generally don't think cheap and expendable are features but I would argue that they are. I need a product I'm not concerned to drop or scratch or have stolen or spill a drink on. I need something I can replace without tears that I can sleep next to and use while in the bathroom. That's not an $1800 Mac
you have discovered the reason applecare sells well. and frankly the higher the tier of laptop, the more sense it makes - no sense insuring the base-tier model, it's basically disposable, since a non-covered "any other repair" (other than screen) is $700 on (eg) MBP, or $350 (iirc) on a MBA you're basically over halfway to a new unit with a new battery/faster processor/etc. But on a loaded out 64GB/4TB M1 Max MBP ($3k at b+h for a good long while there) then it's worth having it repaired.
arguably on the high-end apple laptops, if you intend to carry them around and actually use them, it's just part of the lifecycle. like, if you have one screen repair in 3 years you break even, if you have one "any other repair" you come out ahead. this is actually constant across all the model lines (MBA screen repairs are cheaper, applecare is still 1/2 of a screen repair).
having insurance on desktops is certainly dumb, but it makes a lot of sense in movable items. people carry around phones and laptops, and they drop them. it happens to wintel PCs too, believe it or not. for the price of prepaying half a screen upfront you basically don't have to worry about your laptop and you also get a 512b memory bus with best-in-class battery life and performance etc.
and I know applecare triggers a lot of haters, "that's a scam, I'm too smart for that!!!", "I won't buy something that I can't repair myself!!!" but like, that generally just speaks to the degree of hostility with which a lot of people approach the apple lifecycle. It's very much designed as a first-party service model, yes of course, but it actually works, and apple laptops actually do achieve long service life with this model. You're not the first person to realize that dropping a $3-4k laptop is gonna feel pretty bad etc, but people tend to systematically dismiss the solutions that have been provided to fix that, because they're not the solutions that the wintel world provides.
And frankly, not having to worry about dropping my laptop is a benefit above and beyond what x86 would provide with the kinds of solutions that are generally quoted, and paying for a premium on-demand business grade warranty on a wintel laptop would probably be roughly as expensive even if it existed on the hardware I'd want (can't get a dell/lenovo/hp business-tier warranty on a redmibook I bought off amazon, right?).
I'm out here carrying my laptop around on a stone patio every evening as I watch the puppy play outside. I'm using it on the toilet above a tile floor. I'm picking it up and moving it every day, and using it on a blanket on the couch. Yesterday I downloaded dolphin-llama3:70b and ran it locally at interactive speeds, I've been doing dolphin-mixtral:8x7b for months now (not full offload so it's not quite as fast). It's a nice laptop and I bought it to use it, $350 up front to simply never worry about it is more than worth it. The same wintel people who told me to get a framework 16 (with no speedstep) are now telling me to wait for strix halo, and I'm out here living the future for almost a full year now, and strix is probably at least a full year from actual real availability (strix halo is coming later than strix point, and AMD paper-launches all their laptop products badly). The $500 I save (maybe) by waiting 2+ years for a comparable x86 solution in 2025 isn't worth it, and I'd still have an expensive laptop with no warranty even if I went PC.
(and that's assuming strix halo is a drop-in replacement - I think people are going to be more disappointed by cost+ battery life than they realize, socketed quad-channel memory with a big stacked cache to improve performance is not cheap in either dollars or watts, those are going to be $3k+ laptops too.)
similarly to how people whine about drop risk and then just ignore the mechanism provided to solve that problem... people do the same thing with turning the parts program into a negative too. Literally apple will sell you the part and the first-party tooling to fix your screen, or even just rent you the tooling... and that's bad because "it comes in three pelican cases!!!" or something. Like people literally insist it's "all for show" or something and it's actually just part of the secret plan to undermine right-to-repair, because Apple will sell you the tools if you want. there is nothing that people can't spin into a negative somehow. There are very few companies with a more real "hater" phenomenon than Apple, and it just colors every discussion on the topic. People forget that there's two sides to every transaction, there is no forced anything, I am making my choices about my own risks and benefits, just not the ones they make. There are scenarios where it makes sense - and probably not as few as the haters want there to be. They just get shouted down by a fairly dedicated/active hater crowd.
https://paulgraham.com/fh.html