your opinion of latitude E5550? Dependable? FHD?

To be entirely fair, Apple has made it a point to try and offer only decent displays. They haven't been wholly successful, but I feel Apple has been consistent enough over the years to deserve such affiliation.

Reading your post, I realized I have been guilty of doing that, at my previous job. Choosing the "best" laptop under $500 isn't easy, especially when finance will not open up for anything better. I think we ended up with a smorgasbord of Sonys, Dells, HPs, and Acers. I guess the extra pennies saved per unit add up in large corporate contracts. In the end, most of the staff ditched their assigned laptops and bought their own computers. We used Office 365 and didn't have any real device policy. I wonder if we just did nothing but create more ewaste with our budget constraint.