[luma]

Did you buy a macbook for $700? That was a pretty low price back then which meant you were buying devices made to a price. Buying a Macbook is one solution, another would have been to spend more money on a higher quality Wintel system.

[andrewprock]

No, it was around $1100 IIRC, maybe as much as $1300.

[luma]

Right, so when spend twice as much you wind up with a better device. I think this might be only tangentially related to the fact that it was an Apple product, rather, you weren't purchasing the cheapest available device.

[andrewprock]

Ten years ago Apple was by far the highest quality laptop manufacturer. There was essentially no other option back in the early 2010s. Even now laptops with a "retina" display are not always easy to find for other manufacturers. In retrospect, that was probably the killer feature which induced me to switch.