The reason I mentioned MacBook's is because they have excellent battery life, which is important for many people - especially students who are mobile all day long. A cheap Windows laptop will last what, 2-4 hours at the most? With the new MacBook Pro's you can get 7-12 hours out of them.
I almost always recommend MacBook's for students. They have great battery life, the OS is easy to use, less likely to get viruses or malware, most people have iPhone's and iPad's and they sync perfectly with Mac (iCloud), they work out of the box without having to purchase/find/download tons of other software to make it usable, durable and doesn't feel "cheap", thin and light, and they look good which is important for some people.
I do agree with you on most of those points and yes you are absolutely correct that a good battery life is vital for a student, but I personally don't recommend MacBooks for students because they're very expensive for what they are at the end of the day and they are desirable laptops - thus probably more likely to 'draw attention' to you at school and you put yourself at risk of it getting stolen. If some menacing school kid had the choice between stealing a £500 HP or a £1000+ MacBook, what's he going to go for?
I'm looking at buying a laptop for school later on this year. I cannot afford a MacBook, but what I can afford is a ThinkPad L440 (owned two in the past and loved them) which has a Haswell i3, 14" HD+ display, a 500GB HDD, 8GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM, very good build quality and an excellent keyboard (because it's a ThinkPad) all for about £650. Far cheaper than the equivalent MacBook. I could spend an extra £80 or so and get an i5, but I'll likely spend that money (and a bit extra) on a 256GB SSD instead to replace the HDD. The battery life of this Lenovo is also very good - Lenovo claim up around 12 hours in fact and there are multiple battery options available - all of which are removable *wink wink*.
12 hours is long enough.
In fact, I had a 'cheapo' Novatech-branded laptop which I set up for a customer the other week - i5 4200M, 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD and admittedly not the best-built machine with a rather 'squidgy' keyboard and only had an HD display which was a bit mediocre, but it only cost about £500 or so and stick Windows 8.1 on power-saver mode and I got 10 hours of battery life out of that. Even on the default 'balanced' mode, you'd be getting maybe 6 or 7 hours which should be long enough. It was a small battery too.
So, there are alternatives. I'm not doubting that the MacBook is a very good machine, I'm just saying that I personally don't think it's the best option for students. Just my thoughts (but generally I am not Apple's biggest fan).
