You have to account for resale when it comes to TCO. Resale value for a non-Apple PC is essentially zero - i.e. no one will buy it, or you'll get pennies on the dollar if they do. Whereas there's a strong market for used Apple hardware, and you can easily recover 50% or more.
This is an exaggeration, or you're not comparing apples to apples.
The used market for high performance PC gear is quite efficient. You're not going to get a high-end CPU or GPU from the past several years for pennies on the dollar.
Likewise, the resale market for Apple products doesn't guarantee 50% or more unless you're only looking at resale value of very new hardware. For example, you can pick up an M1 Max MacBook Pro (not that old) for closer to 1/3 of the original price.
Do people actually buy used computers and sell them? Like, apart from graphics cards...
Seems odd to me. Most computers I've ever had last for ~10 years, at which point resale value is definitely zero...
Similar with phones and tablets: yes, people do that, but it's not the common case. I've only ever sold computing devices within the first month of ownership, after realising I made a mistake in purchasing it (not a broken device, but just not meeting my needs), but on second-hand sites you can also see various people offering them up after 1 or 2 years because they want something shinier and the old system still has value. I've bought my current phone from someone like that, and as a student I also bought such a laptop
I don't sell them but I buy exclusively used computers. All of them coming from the refurbishing market of business computers.
From a purely financial perspective buying a computer or vehicle brand new is a very bad idea.
yeah, I buy preowned laptops fairly often to be fair.
So you recover what you spent extra, per the article?