I'd recommend, as long as you can afford it. Depends on how your kid is with technology though; when I was 15 I probably would've abused the hell out of a laptop, simply because I didn't know any better. But on the other hand, my Mac has taken a beating much worse than the $600-1,100 laptops I've had.
Personally I bought a refurb MBP from Apple in April or May of 2013 and it's been working fine for 6 and a half years. It's showing its age, but it's probably still got a year or two left on it. I keep it at home nowadays, and mostly use it for web browsing, entertainment (Minecraft, YouTube, and Netflix) and some work (programming and data science but I use a cloud provider for computing resource intensive work).
It wasn't that significant in savings (maybe $300-400), but IME, Macs age much better than most other laptops I've used. I've dropped mine 3-4 feet a handful of times and it's still going along fine.