Had my first Mac, a Quadra 610, for 7 years, still worked well when I sold it. I wish I still had the keyboard; Apple Extended keyboard is considered one of the classic pieces of computer hardware, a Real Fucking Keyboard with the manly clatter and click, great key travel, and solid construction.
I still have my last two PowerBooks. Both were used for 5 years before upgrading, both still work. My first PowerBook, the G3 Firewire model, was bomb-proof. Never, ever had a hardware problem that didn’t result from my stupidity (I spilled orange juice all over the keyboard. Computer was fine, but the keyboard had to be replaced. I lived out in the sticks, so had to mail it. Still got it back within a week.) Everything else is original and still works. I was still using it for various small tasks until last year.
My second was an aluminum G4. The Sony hard drive failed just after the one year mark, so I had to pay to replace it. That replacement unit was a Toshiba, which hasn’t failed yet after over 5 years of use. The screen started to go wonky after years of bouncing around in a bag or backpack, including occasional 1–2 km runs to catch the shinkansen train, which only came once an hour where I lived. Shimming works, so I’m pretty sure it’s a loose connection caused by rough handling. That didn’t pop up until the last few months of use, which was at around the 6 year mark.
For PCs, my wife’s Sony Vaio had various problems from somewhere in the first year, and got progressively worse. The TV card never worked well, and gradually started to lose contrast, then just stopped working. Thing took ages to boot, and got worse over time. And since it was Sony, there were a bunch of proprietary hardware and software issues, so it’s not like you could just nuke and pave it, like most other machines.
Her second was a built to order computer. I researched all the parts and found a shop to put it together. That worked quite well for the first couple of years, aside from the usual Windows maintenance headaches. In the last year or so, though, it’s been shutting down randomly, rebooting spontaneously, and giving various error messages in BIOS that flash by too quickly for my wife to write down, and that don’t repeat regularly enough to catch. The parts were the best “bang for your buck” at the time, so none of them were the absolute best. Considering that it’s been almost 5 years, everything has lasted relatively well.
From my limited experience, I wouldn’t buy anything made by Sony again. Ever. Sony was also the source of the batteries in Apple products that were catching on fire and exploding a few years back. The BTO Windows computer has had no overt hardware problems, but I’ve invested literally days worth of maintenance hours in keeping Windows happy that I haven’t had to put into my own OS X machines.
I expect my MacBook Pro to last 4–5 years, like each of its predecessors. My wife’s next computer is probably going to be a Mac. I’m tired of wrestling with Windows and can’t expect my wife to put up with the technical headaches of Linux. Not to mention the effort I’d have to put into learning it well enough to teach how to use it as opposed to my occasional dabbling. And finding alternate software for all the things she wants to do.