I think part of the love for those models is how hobbled the successors to these laptops were. First the line basically stopped improving while the Macbook Pro went Retina, second there was the expensive Macbook no qualifier with a dreadful butterfly keyboard, and then the 2018 Macbook Air came out but still had a dreadful butterfly keyboard. Only in March 2020 did a proper, no compromise, better in every way laptop came out to replace a Macbook Air bought in 2012-2015.