Every Apple product I've bought still works. Every other brand

broke. Save the Commodore 64 and the Atari 2600, if they count. Still functional as far as I know, in whatever boxes in whatever attic they're in.

The Departed:

- No name IBM AT clone -- motherboard self-immolated

- Dell Pentium something or another -- power switch failure and some other random self-shutdown nonsense.

- HP laptop -- spontaneous motherboard meltdown

- HP laptop -- case cracked and separated (*never* dropped, by the way) in such a way it couldn't be opened or closed

____________

The Living:

- SO's first gen MacBook Pro
- Her newer MacBook Pro,
- Our iMac that's older than any HP / PC product I've ever owned
- Two first-gen iPods
- First-gen iPhone
- First-gen iPad
- Ipad 2
- Ipad 4
- Two iPod nanos of different generations
- Two newer iPhones

- All operational and issue free, save hard drive replacements on the extremely hard-working MacBook Pros, which Apple repaired adroitly for reasonable out-of-warranty costs, and in one case threw in a free new MacBook keyboard / faceplate, just to be nice.

Both co-workers who switched to Android phones from iPhones a year or two ago had catastrophic technical failures. Something about those "user replaceable batteries" went kaflooey.

So, no, it's not hype and marketing. These machines are better. Which is probably why it's never Apple people starting rants about how their equipment is so much better than everyone else's.

They already know.

Edit: And that's without getting into the bloatware and constant "security updates" from Microsoft. Jesus, it's been so long I almost forgot about all that endless crap. The anti-virus b.s. alone was ridiculous.

Edit: Totally forgot the 486 clone I had in the early 90s. Arrived with a glitch in the power button and had to be shipped back and replaced immediately. I forget how it died. Or it might actually have been theoretically functional when I replaced with the Dell. Still more trouble than any of the Apple stuff.