All I can say is that I have had PC's from Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Sony, even Compaq in the early days (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable 
), and regrettably godawful no-name brands recently over the past 10 years, since I work in a UK university and the PC's we buy are determined centrally. Throughout this entire time, which spans from the mid 1980's, Mac's have simply been more robust and have had enough processing power to do what I needed them to do. After the switch to Intel processors, it came to the point I'd rather buy Mac's because they got the job done, even emulating Windows, without fizzling and smoking (yes, I've had PC's that literally caught fire). No doubt one's impressions of computers depend on what you use them for. Mine have been used predominately for office tasks, data acquisition, data analysis, and data visualisation. I do not care if some specialised rig shaves off a few nanoseconds of processing time for a task. I am looking for productivity, which is a combination of hardware optimisation and good user interface.
I feel your pain but the problem is that especially the UK education sector seems to prefer to go for the lowest cost options. And yes, all the big names also sell some cheaper crap to the audience that wants it
Where I work we oversee around 50k machines globally (plus a ton of servers), and that includes some contingent of Macs. Most of the systems are HP or Dell (high end series, not the cheap prosumer stuff), some are Lenovo and a few are Fujitsu. Neither brand is particularly bad (i.e., excessive overall failure rate), but the most troublesome systems have been Macs.
It's not that Macs fail that more often, it's what happens when they fail as Apple is completely inebt when it comes dealing with large customers. For example, if one of our HP workstations fail then I open a support case online, describe the problem and steps I took to narrow down the source, and in most cases either the spare part or an engineer with the spare part turns up on our doorstep the next day (because we know the systems we tend to just request the spare part). Keep in mind that this is covered within the standard warranty (3yrs NBD), not through additional service contracts (which we have only on critical systems), which already offers a level of support that Apple can't provide at any cost. And the workstations themselves are so maintenance friendly that changing most parts doesn't even require a screwdriver (even PSUs have been plug and play for a long time) so replacing many components can be done in a few minutes until the system is back in working condition. More often than not, Macs are maintenance nightmares in comparison.
On top of that, there are Apple's design priorities (such as using a very soft aluminum alloy as a shell for a laptop, the excessive focus on thin-ness, bolted-in keyboards, glued-in batteries or the increasing lack of connectivity) which cause additional headache, and so do the various design flaws built into many of their systems (such as cable gate, cracked screens, keyboard-gate or the chronically underspec'd cooling solutions in many Macs) where Apple often just tries to sit out the problem instead of addressing it proactively. Granted, that can happen on PCs, too (Dell certainly had its fair share of lemon series), but it's a lot less common than on Apple hardware, at least as business/enterprise class PC hardware is concerned (and any problems are usually resolved pretty quickly).
And I'm not even touching the fact that PC hardare is way more flexible to adapt to specific needs than Apple Macs.
If there was a decent viable alternative to macOS then we'd happily dump our Apple computers in a heartbeat (not the iPhones/iPads, though).
support.apple.com
www.theguardian.com
