Considering that the Acer Chromebook probably has flash memory, I don't see how this is a fair comparison. I have a 2012 Macbook Air and Macbook Pro that have had no issues. The Macbook Air is my general around the house laptop and the MBP is used as a Plex box. Still do everything I need them to do and the only issue is the battery life of the Macbook Air since it's gone through way too many charge cycles.
So why is that Acer is able to afford an SSD in a $150 computer, but Apple can't afford an SSD in a $1500 computer? Heck, Apple still doesn't have SSDs in their latest gen (2019) iMacs...
The Acer is probably flash memory, not an SSD. The $1500 iMac has a "1 TB fusion drive" which is apparently a hybrid of flash memory and an HDD (and all iMacs have the option to be configured with an SSD). I have no idea why they don't have it by default. They probably have a bunch of data that shows that the main consumers of iMacs don't know the difference or don't care. I'm just pointing out that your comparison was not genuine because you compared a problem with a component on one laptop that the other doesn't have.
I as a consumer don't care if the comparison is apples to apples at a component level.
I am doing a high level comparison between laptop computers. One has been fast and reliable, the other has not. One was 10x more expensive than the other.
I don't care if the MBP had a quantum drive from the year 3000. If my user experience with it is worse than a Chromebook, I'm not buying another one.
According to Apple, the 5 year old Macbook Pro was only offered with "PCIe-based flash storage". So if you had an Acer from 5 years ago and a Macbook Pro you bought at the same time, you have an SSD in the MBP.
It definitely had a spinning disk. It was actually closer 6 years ago and it was a 2012 model I believe. It shipped with OS X Lion and got slower and slower with each OS X upgrade. By the time it had El Capitan it was a far cry from when I bought it in terms of snappiness to open programs.
Considering that the Acer Chromebook probably has flash memory, I don't see how this is a fair comparison. I have a 2012 Macbook Air and Macbook Pro that have had no issues. The Macbook Air is my general around the house laptop and the MBP is used as a Plex box. Still do everything I need them to do and the only issue is the battery life of the Macbook Air since it's gone through way too many charge cycles.