Used a nice little laptop for years in college. I kept fighting it on the headphone jack. It would not recognize when it was plugged in, or the sound did not work period. Hot keys would not work. Etc, etc. Besides that, everyone would always comment on what a nice little laptop it was as I ran it into the ground.
When it died I bounced from HP (horrible, came with AMD graphics that would overheat and AMD cut support for a month later, while still selling them) and then Dell (mostly horrible, but due to Sandy Bridge having horrible graphics support, the Dell had a short power cord, the USB shorted out)
Got System76 Lemur, it was like my old laptop, very small, very quiet, hardware switches for wifi, brightness & turning off screen so they would work. Ivy Bridge would freeze X if I closed and opened the lid enough, but that disappeared with the next version of Ubuntu. Similar issue with Skylake Lemur, went away when I used Manjaro with Mesa 13.
There is a small premium vs Dell or HP systems, but those are Dell and HP systems. You get what you pay for. Loud, poorly design pieces of crap (at least when I bought them). If you are willing to drop a grand and a half on a Macbook you would still save money on a System76.