> You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience.

Or you could spend $200 more (or $100 more with edu pricing) and get a MacBook Neo which has significantly higher build quality, a much better screen, a great trackpad, and amazing performance.

Seeing how college students throw laptops in backpacks, that extra $100 (edu pricing) could very easily save them money in the long run.

> There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory

Every once in a while I go looking for a Chromebook-level laptop for some extra purpose and I am never impressed by anything. The current selection is all ancient processors, bad screens, creaky build quality. If you must stick to a strict budget then these can work, but I wouldn't call them good.

First impressions can be a very poor judge of build quality. If you pick up a mil-spec laptop it'll feel a lot more like the $200 Chromebook. Yet it'll survive endurance tests that neither the Chromebook nor the Macbook will.