This doesn't surprise me. Looking at the new Macs, I have very little desire to buy one. These days I can't justify anything Apple. They used to make great products in my opinion but I am glad I bought mine ages ago as I have very little desire to buy anything Apple lately. I am hoping my Macbook keeps going as it serves its purpose. On that note, I have been very underwhelmed by laptops that are out there. It seems if you want one to last you have to spend regardless of whether it is windows or PC.
Or, you could look at it a different way--$1000 buys you a WAY better laptop nowadays than it did even 5 years ago, even ignoring technological advancements and inflation. I remember back in '02 when Black Friday was still worth it, one of the big box office supply stores had a fantastic deal on a laptop--$1000 for a Pentium 4 laptop. It weighed probably 9 lbs, had the shape of a 2x10, lasted about 2 hours on battery, and felt like it would fall apart. That same $1000 ($1400 today) will get you a tricked out XPS 13 with a very sleek, rigid, sub-3lb aluminum chassis with an HD screen and it'll last all day on a charge.
Of course, you can also opt for something a couple years old--I scored a used Dell Inspiron 7368 for about $300. It features a similar all-aluminum chassis, expandable memory and replaceable HDD or SSD, and similar battery life, along with a gorgeous display.
When someone talks about a computer "lasting," there's really three things at play:
1) hardware (either electronics or the case) breaking. Unless it's something soldered to the motherboard, it's not difficult to repair, and the more recent aluminum chassis are fantastic. I also recommend getting a used business line computer, because they tend to be built better.
2) hardware becoming obsolete - if you choose wisely, you can upgrade down the road. And CPU performance hasn't seen huge gains in the last several years, so this really isn't an issue.
3) the computer bogging down. A clean wipe and install of the OS will take care of this. Just back up your data ahead of time.