>[some Apple laptops]... reliable workhorses lasting 10 years or more.
>As opposed to some other laptops that boil themselves alive at idle;
>and have unsurprisingly short asset lifetimes (and not much better to repair).
I'm on my 5th year of using a Lenovo X1 Carbon, first generation, i7, circa 2012. It's been in use for hours every day since I bought it in 2017, second hand on eBay, for ~£400.
I replaced the external power supply after a couple of years of use that involved much-too-frequent cable-flexing. I've yet to replace the fan that failed about 4 years ago. (*) It doesn't get too much heat-making use (apart from intermittent YouTube distractions) or I'd have been less tardy about fitting a new one. It's mostly used for CMS / educational content creation and substantial emacs / git / shell script stuff, plus some video work and usual office-type things.
It's run various versions of Linux, plus VirtualBox.
The keyboard is better than any other I've experienced on a laptop in 30+ years. (Apple's have been too form-over-function unreliable in recent years and were never as good as Lenovo even at their best).
It's strong, slim, lightweight.
Because it just works it doesn't need to be 'bigged up' with boastful, often misleading and not always true, slogans about 'just working'. But I suppose some people like to believe the marketing b/s to justify their choice.
When it eventually gives up I'll get another second-hand Lenovo. I could probably do that 4 or 5 times for the price of a similarly powered Apple laptop and have the added satisfaction of using a well-engineered, professional grade laptop without the embarrassment of a glowing Apple logo in the Starbucks clone-rows.
(*) Well engineered hardware is easy to maintain, by definition. Engineering compromised by marketing, not so much.