The 8GB models are manufactured e-waste but the usable lineup are great machines. They’re practically unrepairable, but they’re built not to need repairs.
If you care about swapping out the SSD or replacing the RAM, you shouldn’t buy Apple. I promise you, though, that 99% of laptop users don’t, and that includes a significant part of Linux users.
Macs are expensive as balls but there simply aren’t any competitors for them. They’re the “overkill everything” segment that’s too small to target for other manufacturers. There are maybe one or two series of laptops that come close in speaker quality, and one of those consists of gaming laptops designed after 80s scifi spaceships, and the other comes with terrible battery and even worse Linux support, and both of them lack the battery life+performance quality Apple managed to squeeze out of their CPU.
I wish someone would produce Macbooks other than Apple. It’s an awful company that produces great hardware for a competitive price, it you care about all the Macbook has to offer. And to be honest, that’s not because Apple is such an amazing manufacturer, it’s because AMD and Intel are behind the curve (Qualcom even more), and the laptop manufacturers that try to compete with Apple always try to squeeze just that little bit of extra cost cutting out of their models so their shit doesn’t cost more, and preload their top of the line hardware with Windows 11 Home (the one with candy crush pinned to the start menu) and their stupid GAMER software suite that works on three models and stops being maintained after two updates.