Several years ago while at a university for CS, I was doing a senior class where I was doing whatever an assigned professor wanted me to help with. I was given two identical ThinkPads and a mid-2012 MacBook Pro and told to figure out a network partitioning problem involving virtual machines.
Since the ThinkPads were running Windows, those were pretty forgettable. But as soon as I opened up the MacBook Pro and turned it on, my first thought was "This is a workstation."
At the time my personal laptop was a 11" MacBook Air. Currently I use a 2014 Mac mini and a mid-2012 MBP, which I bought used because of that faithful encounter.
I've never been able to elicit that initial reaction I had to the MBP since owning one myself. It's one of those things like how a single bite of someone else's food tastes better than the whole dish you end up ordering for yourself.
As an aside, I bought a SPARCstation IPC for $25 from someone on IRC around 2001.