I still debate a MacBook as my next laptop, but as always I can't really justify the price. That and by all accounts the bar thing on the new ones is terrible.

I bought a first-gen MBP in 2007 for law school, and I loved it. We didn't need Word back then, either: all exams had to be printed out on our own (so I just used Pages), and my one big third-year writing assignment I wrote in LaTeX and submitted as a PDF. I used Pages and OmniGraffle for note-taking and Adium for IM. It was great. (Helped that I was able to double the RAM for like $20 a year after I bought it, too.)

At that time (2007-2009) there were only a handful of Mac users. I saw the woman who runs the helpdesk (for whom I worked while I was in school) a couple weeks ago, and she told me that they're now easily 50-50. The computer lab has iMacs with Windows VMs, but people boot into macOS more than half the time. Academia seems to be really embracing Apple. The legal profession still revolves around Word, but I wonder how much longer that'll be the case (really it's only necessary now for trading stuff between lawyers; all filing is done either electronically or printed.) Cloud services are posing a bit of a problem from an ethical standpoint, which is why I never used any Google service for anything when I was in private practice.

Anyway, these days the only reason I even still use a laptop is for posting nonsense online while watching YouTube or Netflix on a second monitor during my work-from-home days. Once I get a new gaming desktop, I'm installing Linux on my old one and putting it in the home office for that purpose, and will be using my laptop for e-mail, hubski-ing, and the like downstairs. (New desktop is going to be gaming only.)