It's always this. "This brand new £1500 laptop I don't share with anyone, coddle like a newborn and barely use for anything other than running Office is so much better than the £350 ten year old laptop I was sharing with my entire family and was used for playing video games, downloading warez and pirated media, and running Office."

You can get a 2020 M1 / 2022 M2 Macbook air for ~400€, that will mop the floor with all new hardware in that price range released even today (completely fanless/noiseless btw.). It also has decent linux support via asahi and Apple will still probably provide 5+ years of macOS updates anyway.

• geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16388159?baseline=16471197
• ebay.de sold macbooks: https://www.ebay.de/sch/111422/i.html?_fsrp=1&_udlo=150&rt=nc&_nkw=macbook+air+%28m1%2Cm2%29&_sacat=111422&_sop=13&LH_PrefLoc=3&LH_Sold=1&LH_ItemCondition=1000%7C2010%7C1500%7C2020%7C2030%7C2500%7C3000
• random lenovo: https://www.notebooksbilliger.de/lenovo+v15+g5+83gw00a7ge+820626

The simple trick to owning nice hardware is to never give vendors your money directly, let others burden the depreciation.

Locking me in to what and how? It’s a laptop, a tool, not a religion. I don’t give a fuck about any of that shit as long as the OS gets out of the way, stuff just works and I can get on with my job.

Yeah, my complaints about Apple all stem from the fact that my industry has a standard program that only runs on Macs… And every Mac I’ve used has inevitably ended up taking 4x as long to do basically anything else when compared to Windows or Linux. The only reason I ever use a Mac is because my job requires it, and even then it is only begrudgingly; if there was a way to run the program on anything else, I would have done so a long time ago.

And yeah, I agree 100% about the “different first, better second” design choices. Lots of the most frustrating things about Macs are due to intentional design choices that Apple makes. Not because it is better for the user, but simply because it is different.

A lot of the “different first” has to do with Microsoft patenting UI elements, methodologies and design choices. I’ve never understood why people trash Apple computers so vehemently. They’re a fairly robust software suite targeted at consumers and amateur creatives that’s tailor made to run on the hardware it ships with, if you don’t use those things that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad.

I’ve had laptops from almost every major manufacturer and frankly the MacBooks I’ve had stood out save for a few niche problems like dock compatibility. The only manufacturer that regularly comes even remotely close is Lenovo. My work provided dell is 4 years old, cost the same as than an equivalent Mac at the time and is trash. I get 90 minutes out of the battery if I’m lucky, trackpad feels horrible and is inaccurate, can’t do gestures reliably and is horribly unintuitive (must click on the bottom left corner to get a left click despite the whole thing being clickable (tapping works about half the time) but it’s placed so far left i think it’s made for left handed people), case is warped because the battery swelled and had to be replaced after 2 months, it bitches about the charger it was shipped with saying it’s underpowered, the screen has bleeding on many pixel clusters. Why was that thing listed so high when the Mac we bought another user at the same price still works and has only had a problem with cheap dock compatibility? Oh because it said i7, had an ssd (which failed), a “multi-touch/gesture capable” trackpad. and a numpad. This has been the general quality of 4/5 of work provided laptops, 3 were Dell, one was HP, the only good one was a Lenovo. All were business targeted models with not too dissimilar pricing from a MacBook. I als deploy a lot of machines, mostly laptops, and honestly the only ones that do not come half functional out of the box or need warranty in less than a year are Apple and Lenovo.

Performance is good, but not great, and, again, is trounced by most of its equivalents, even the Surface Book.

Sure, you can find an equivalent priced laptop that will beat the MBPro at one metric, but it’ll fall short on others. It’s faster but it has a cheap case , crappy trackpad, shit screen or terrible battery life, etc.

There are very few laptops out there that are as good in every metric as a MBPro. It is simply the best total package.