I’m not an expert on non-Apple hardware by any means, but the Apple stuff I’ve had over the past 20 years has all be incredibly well built. The lone exception was the white plastic MacBook I got in 2007 which was broadly good, but designed in such a way that the palm rest would always chip where the little standoffs at the top of the screen pushed against it when it was closed. But other than that, iPods, iPhones, Macs, iPads, Apple TV, all of them have been very, very well put together.
Whether the components inside were good value for what I paid is a different matter, but the build quality was always exceptional. I never had a MacBook released between 2016 and 2019 though. We don’t talk of those.
But yeah, the software - even with all the current shortcomings - has always been good. Moving from iOS to Graphene was one hell of a learning curve in working out that it was always easy to do stuff on my phone because Apple had put the work into making software that did what their customers needed it to. And for whatever reason, most folks who make apps for iOS/iPadOS put a lot of effort into making their apps really nice to use. The same isn’t always true of Android.