Regarding market share and your friends and family recommendations, you’re thinking first world. Rest of the world wants and can only afford sub-$500 laptops.
My mom is happily using a Lenovo from 2013 and looking to upgrade because it doesn't support Windows 11 and Win10 is running out of support. A contemporary Mac would have been the 2012 Mac Mini which would have received its final OS update with 10.15 Catalina in 2019, and would have received its final security update in 2022. (Desktop, so no difference in peripherals, etc.)
Incidentally, I actually purchased both the Lenovo and a 2012 Mac Mini (refurb) so I have the pricing data - the Lenovo was $540 and the Mac Mini was $730 - and then both took aftermarket memory and SSD upgrades.
A 500 laptop is probably more repairable and worst case you pay $500 to get a new one. Not to mention battery replacement etc.
The expected total cost of ownership is very high for a Mac. It’s like owning a Mercedes. Maybe you can afford to buy one, but you cannot afford maintenance.
Between work and personal, I’ve had an Intel Air, 2x Intel Pros, M1 Air, 2x M3 Pros, and an M4 Pro. My wife has an M1 Air. My in-laws have an M3 iMac. My mom has… some version of an Apple Silicon laptop.
That is a decent amount of computers stretching over many years. The only maintenance required has been the aforementioned keyboard.
In pre-college education, the answer is often "use any other junky Chromebook from anywhere in the world", which is cheaper still.
I did drop my watch last week, and the second hand fell off, though.
If that had happened to any other laptop I would be able either replace just the broken keycap, or just the keyboard.
And no, apple care+ that covers accidents is not cheap either at $150/year.
Also a lot of people prefer windows. It’s got a lot more applications than Mac. It has way more historical enterprise support and management capability as well. If you had a Mac at a big company 20 years ago the IT tooling was trash compared to windows. It’s probably still inferior to this day.
The Mac can (legally) run more software than any other computer. Aside from macOS software, there's a bunch of iOS and iPadOS software that you can run, and you can run a Windows, Linux, and Android software via VMs.
Let’s not forget that you’re now talking about buying a $100/year license; in just a few years you could buy a whole Windows computer with a permanent license for that money.
And if you’re going to talk about how great VMs are on Mac we can’t leave out how it’s the worst Docker/podman platform available.