It's unfortunate that your Apple hardware experience was so poor, but you're really not going to have better luck elsewhere - all the major hw manufacturers have a fairly similar failure rate [1] (Apple apparently is one of the better ones). You just got unlucky.

[1] http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliab... http://www.statisticbrain.com/laptop-malfunction-rates/