I think laptops might be one of the most over-purchased mis-purchases that consumers make when choosing a computer. Most people I know with them don’t have a need to take them anywhere, leave them on 24 hours a day and don’t properly take care of them. Laptops as a whole are a compromise. A premium is paid to have a smaller, lighter, more portable computer that, with only a few exceptions, doesn’t have as much horsepower under the hood as a desktop version of it. They are also more prone to be dropped, stolen, have hard drive and optical drive failures, hinges break, cracked, spotted and dead pixels in the LCD screens. There is almost always a compromise for hard drive space as well.

I wouldn’t really chock up a laptop as an investment. If you need one for work or are always on the go, expect to do an upgrade every 2-3 years. In some cases, the upgrade is needed to support the newest operating system.

At this point, I have zero regrets buying a Macbook, but it is already scratched to hell and starting to yellow (I have a white one) where my hands wrest on it. For a $1200 piece of hardware, I expect a little more. Macs on a general do indeed hold a resale value much better than Windows based laptops, so in that regard you made a smart choice. Outside of that, it will hold up as well as you treat it and how up to date you keep it.

Phil, I don’t know about refurbs, but I agree with making your tech purchases investments. I’ve gone through 2 PC laptops in 4 years and have just purchased a mac (macbook pro); my hope is the machine will like up to it’s word-of-mouth accolades and save me money long-term.

But after that, any time that PC hiccuped, I wondered if it was because of some other flaw in it that wasn’t obvious right away. Did I install some lousy software utility, or is this thing a lemon???

I dumped that machine after just a couple years and vowed to never buy a refurb again.