[thecupisblue]

You reminded me of the last time I spent money on a laptop before mac. Well, it wasn't me, it was my parents. For half the price of new mac air, I got a Toshiba budget notebook. It barely lasted 2 years, which was the amount it's "anything happens" warranty expired - which wasn't really anything happens. The CD ROM just didnt slide back in totally one day and stuck. The shift key got so fucked up I had to disable it preboot or I'd be stuck with caps. Fun times. Never again. Made me appreciate macs way more when I got one.

[benhurmarcel]

And I used a Dell XPS for 8 years. Not only Macs have good quality.

[fraudsyndrome]

Similar story although I haven't purchased a macbook yet. Used to purchase laptops within the 500AUD range which would break or die within a year, decided to spend 1000AUD on a Asus zenbook and it's held up quite nicely over 3 years - only issue being the battery but that's expected.

Haven't spent anything close to a MBP but I know people still using the 2015 model and holding up nicely. I guess price sort of correlates to build quality? Although same can't be said for resale value.

[kyleee]

I still quite happily daily drive (in reality, every other day or so) a 2011 MBA upgraded to 4 gigs of ram (came with 2). I have had to replace the battery with an aftermarket one once, and other than that it's been the best machine I've ever owned. I did not update to catlina however, I fear that may be a death knell

[philistine]

I am writing this from a 2013 Macbook Air. It works fine.

[raiyu]

Same. Amazing how well it’s held up.

I did need to do a repair on the motherboard as it stopped charging but one repair after 7 years is crazy.

[patrickthebold]

Meh, I used a $300 netbook for 6 years.

[tomcam]

OK I need to hear more about that one. I’m guessing it’s all command line development?

[patrickthebold]

It was I think dual core 1.5 G with a gig an a half of ram. It was an upgrade from 800Mhz Pentium III (this was a long time ago.) So it was doing normal personal computing things: Web browsing, photo manager, mp3 player, email, document editing (mostly latex, inkscape, gimp). I had a keyboard and an external monitor since the thing was too tiny.