A while ago I thought the same thing about Apple and then I realized that it’s just really easy comparatively. But yeah I’m doing something similar going into computer science. Depends on what surface you get, I got a refurbished Surface Book 3 on Amazon which is always a gamble but it was significantly cheaper, mine looked and felt completely new when I got it. Been holding up well so far.
Password managers are a requirement for me these days. With how many breaches occur daily that we might not even know about you probably want a password that hasn’t been reversed or used before. For me I don’t know what I’d do without Bitwarden. I previously used LastPass until they added some restrictions and I figured out that Bitwarden was opensource. I don’t currently run my own instance of it but easily could, keeping my passwords off other peoples computers.