It really is astonishing, isn't it? Here you have a company with scandal after scandal regarding their bad long term durability - batteries being neutered, keyboards with keys that break, laptop displays that disconnect, unibodies that aren't unibodies, laptop coolers that don't cool -, embarassingly bad repairability and expandability across their product range, and that has one of the worst warranty programs of all of them. And for one inexplicable reason (stockholm syndrom? No experience with other products? Status thinking as the sole decider on what is good?) people still claim that stuff. That's also where the cult classification is coming from.
I mentioned 2011, which is well before the nasty keyboards.
You guys are spending a lot of effort to respond to things I didn't say, including anything at all about competitors. Sony Vaio laptops probably hold their value longest, AFAIK, but that doesn't mean Apple laptop haven't traditionally held value quite well.
Funny that you mentioned VAIO, because that was the last in a succession of crappy machines that bit the dust within a year before I finally bought a Macbook Air 9 years ago. It's still going. As is the 2009 Mac Mini I got from eBay in which I just upgraded the RAM and hard drive (to an SSD).
It's a similar story for me with smartphones. My first was a Droid X2. After about 9 months I switched to an iPhone 4 and used it for the next 5 years. Then upgraded to a 6s which I only retired for an 11 Pro last year because work bought it for me. They all work fine today.
I babied every Dell/Sony machine and that Droid just like every Apple product I've purchased since; this is just the proof I've found in the pudding after eating both kinds.
