Honest answer: Apple is a lifestyle brand, however they manage to offer a superior product to the layman because they have tight control over both hardware and software codevelopment. In my experience, people tend to also like Apple hardware because Apple stores are ubiquitous, so when you need a repair done, you just take it to your local mall and get it fixed rather than mailing it away to Lenovo and hoping for the best.
Out of curiosity, in your engineering course, what are students expected to used to their own computers for? In my experience, any engineering course with labs that would require dongles supply desktop computers anyway. Your school doesn't have desktops in the classroom right? What equipment are you interfacing with that would be easily both mac and pc compatible anyway?
It's astounding how difficult it is to find non-garbage build quality on, well, pretty much anything. Even just for something as basic as a charger, Apple is probably the only company you can rely on to not use third-rate electrolytic capacitors. Maybe Anker too.
I've had a lot of "just works" with thinkpads' pre-loaded windows installs.
Every other windows laptop brand, not so much.
Mileage will of course vary - any thinkpad centric thread on here has a bunch of people with experiences like mine and a bunch of horror stories, after all.
"I want it to just work" is a very subjective phrase. I think you'll find the majority of users have very different use cases for technology than you do.
Also, try to read past the first sentence before you downvote me.
People prefer to use their own development environments, and the microcontroller family we have designed assignments around (Atmel AVR) has a cross-platform toolchain.
Out of curiosity, in your engineering course, what are students expected to used to their own computers for? In my experience, any engineering course with labs that would require dongles supply desktop computers anyway. Your school doesn't have desktops in the classroom right? What equipment are you interfacing with that would be easily both mac and pc compatible anyway?