It's also worth pointing out that the $500 laptop will probably last a lot longer than the most expensive Macbook. All plastic, they use a lot of older/reliable technology, they don't get used as rough - the most common failure mode is they get too old/slow for the user.
In the last 12 years, I’ve owned 3 MacBooks. Maybe my experience isn’t common, but the units that I’ve bought, have always outlived my windows machines.
When averaged out to cost per year, in my experience, Apple is way cheaper.
Part of the issue here is that "Windows machines" could mean anything from an el cheapo Asus to a mil-spec Thinkpad.
I also think that people don't necessarily appreciate how much quality improvements have been made in the last 5-7 years in consumer laptops. Optical drives are gone, everything has an SSD, performance has plateaued and AMD is good again.
Someone walking into Best Buy today and dropping $500 on a laptop will be getting a much more robust machine than when I did the same back in college.
You are 100% right, besides the mil spec, which explicitly means the “least expensive option that does the job”.
I can attest that recently, the average laptop is way better. My machines were a toshiba, surface (2nd gen), and think pads (during their dark ages), dell XPS.
My two MacBook Air, both from 2013, are still working. They both have battery issues but I plan to replace the battery.
My MacBook Air M1 had that very screen defect thing happen for no reason after... 10 months.
So, basically: ten years vs ten months.
Many people are reporting this issue: Apple fucked up big times and it's time to stop apologizing.
I don't care how genius the Apple geniuses are and I don't care that my 10 years old MacBook are still working: what I do care about is that my 10 months old M1 Air died on me out of nowhere.
Yes, that is really, really messed up. I’m not abdicating Apple from making a crap machine that they will be fixing for the next X years because of whatever issue.
Currently, I still have faith in Apple, despite their lemons only because other companies laptops sucked more.
But that does not mean your point in invalid, at all. I just hope that this is an isolated incident to a particular generation vs a broad company trend.
My 2008 white macbook had cracking wrist rest, exactly like any other macbook fromp this generation, and it seems every macbook since then had its very own issue impossible to avoid. I Love Apple laptops but it's like you're always buying them and using them with a sword of Damocles over your head.
I bought an Air in 2014 that lasted me until last year when I bought a new one. The old one still works. It's just too slow for my needs. I still open it up occasionally for some things. Longest running computer I've ever owned by a long shot.
I have a 2011 13" Air that has been mine, then my wife's, then my kid's. It has been thrown in backpacks, dropped, stood on, you name it. It's still going strong, and my kid still pulls it out to play some Mac-only games every few weeks.
I've got a 2014 15" MBP. It's had the screen replacement (free), and a bulging battery got me a new lower case & battery for $200. Still my daily driver.
OTOH, my wife has a 2017 MacBook which is on its third keyboard/lower case. Both the replacements were free, but it's a PITA to have to take it to the store and be without it for a few days while they swap in the new one.
Either way, my experiences have been uniformly positive with Apple's service, and whatever issues exist with the underlying hardware, if they're Apple's fault, I've had no trouble getting replacements for free.
I hate the fact I need to research 'vintages' for every product nowadays. Almost every product has a good production year followed by several worse ones. Like wine.
I'm not trying to make a case that Macs are inferior. A Nissan is a much crappier car than a BMW, but I would bet on the crappier Nissan to run much longer without need of serious maintenance.
One thing I learned is japanese cars function very well if you change their oil very frequently. It's usually 10k miles by the book, but also the book says if you sit in traffic a lot or go short trips this should be more frequent, even as often as 3-5k miles. Most people don't read this fine print and get surprised their car burns 2 quarts of oil per thousand miles by 40k miles.
You know what would help? Data! Your car analogy is backed by decades of that being available from a slew of organizations.
Computers are harder to get that for, especially when you have to correct for things like whether different classes of buyer have notably different habits.
I probably use my laptops harder than most people, but this has not been my experience with plastic laptops. I lost two laptops in a row to the plastic case cracking. In the first case the case broke around the hinge and destroyed a fan. In the second, about half the keys on the keyboard stopped working. I'll never buy another plastic-chassis laptop after that second one.
I can beat you! I had both issues, cracked hinge AND keyboard not working anymore on the same PC! It wasn't even a "cheap" model, but a rather mid-range HP ProBook. Judging by current prices, it should have been around €800 at the time.
> I probably use my laptops harder than most people
Yeah, I didn't. This was basically a sedentary laptop, 95% of the time sitting on a desk connected to external screens / kb / mouse in an AC office, never in the sun. The other 5% I'd carry it around to meetings in the same building.
Since I was using it so little as a portable, it actually outlasted my colleagues' ones by two generations! So, it wasn't just my particular one that was a piece of junk.
> It blows all the “premium” work laptops out of the water.
I disagree. I loved my Thinkpad T450s so much I bought an identical used machine when I quit the job. Since then it's been stepped on, dropped onto concrete multiple times, had beer and wine spilled on the keyboard.
It cost me $250 + $100 for a battery replacement + $34 for a new keyboard (when the wine spilled on it, it still worked but the keys were sticky) + $150 to upgrade the RAM.
It's currently running Visual Studio Code, Photoshop, and prepping to run a pub trivia event later.
But this is all a digression - my larger point is that a $500 laptop bought today is going to have a lot more longevity than people will give it credit for.
One caveat wrt the more recent mil-spec Thinkpads is that they broke the ergonomics by making the front edge razor-sharp, so that it really cuts into your wrists. I tried to work on my T14-2 on a long train ride, and the pain in my wrists the following days kept we awake at night.
My daily Linux driver is a ThinkPad X220. $75 on eBay + another $120 for IPS LCD screen and an SSD. I use it when it really need Linux or when I’m on the go and don’t want to carry a 15” laptop. I wish they still had 1080p conversion kits for that one…
But my current Dell Precision from work is a spectacular nightmare POS.
I'm also a big fan of the 2012 macbook pros. I only upgraded to an M1 mac end of last year.
I love that the older macbooks can be opened up and fixed if needed. I had to replace the HD connector a couple times (and learnt to add some electrical tape to stop the issue), and I recently cleaned the old CPU adhesive off and added some new (old macbooks can start to smell like Body odour!).
With 16GB of RAM the macbook performance is still decent, able to run docker and run modern IDEs.
It's a great machine. The only downside is that you can no longer update to the most recent OS versions.
Kits and YT videos pretty much always means "beyond the average consumer", meaning either paying a repair shop hundreds of euros in labour/profits, or just replacing the device.
It's also worth pointing out that the $500 laptop will probably last a lot longer than the most expensive Macbook. All plastic, they use a lot of older/reliable technology, they don't get used as rough - the most common failure mode is they get too old/slow for the user.