At the very least based on my own experience you should avoid HP Elitebooks, and Microsoft Surfaces, also Asus Zenbooks, and Dell Inspirons.

...As you can tell from that list I've tried very hard to avoid paying the premium for a MacBook before giving in. They're still not perfect, but they're good enough that I am never going back to a Windows laptop.

Only thing the Macbook does noticeably better is speaker quality which isn't surprising given the size difference.

Macbook now has the M1 going for it.

apt-get is much nicer than brew and all its stupid cask/taps stuff that takes forever for packages to install.

With wslutils installed I have "open" and "pbcopy" equivalents configured which were the only 2 things missing from osx that I use a lot.

Curious to hear more about the keyboard / trackpad issues you're seeing. I have an older XPS model, which has the best laptop keyboard I've ever used (better than any MacBook I've tried) and a great trackpad too (I haven't used a MacBook from the last several years, but it's hard to beat physical left/right buttons).

Has the touchpad changed? Mine is extremely smooth, it does not stick to your finger at all, and has no texturing on the surface like cheap laptops sometimes do.

Furthermore, I'm curious if you've tried Linux on the laptop at all. In the past, most issues I had with "bad" trackpads (other than when the surface itself was bad) were resolved by installing Linux, where the drivers simply worked better than on Windows and were generally more configurable (although the advent of libinput changed that).

Interesting, last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.

And you are actually right that the trackpad surface on XPS in particular is actually one of the better/best ones. However options for tweaking it in Windows settings is non-existent, and so it is much slower than the mac trackpad, and my finger end up fatigued from casual scrolling, which never happens on mac. (This (trackpad scrolling speed) is tweakable eg in VSCode but not in Chrome etc.)

Interesting. On this site, I see nothing but complaints about the Macbook short travel keyboards. I have not used one for more than a few minutes, but I am a fast touch typist and I like the greater travel with my XPS keyboard. It's a whole lot better feeling than the 2014 MBP I have compared it with; the latter has more travel than newer Macbooks but has a mushy, foam-like feel to its switches rather than the firmer, actuator-like feel that I'm used to with the XPS.

> last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.

This depends a lot on the features you're expecting, and also whether you have a touchpad that's compatible with good drivers or not. For a long time the multi-touch story on Linux wasn't great, so users coming from Macs and expecting to use 3, 4 or 5 finger gestures were inevitably disappointed. I find myself not really using these gestures, even when I use a Mac (I bind keyboard shortcuts to my most used functions with Karabiner instead), so it doesn't matter much to me.

Rather, I'm comparing the behavior of a certain class of low quality touchpad that you find in cheap laptops. In Windows, I've seen these touchpads jerk around, not really detect your finger properly, have weird acceleration ramps, and have bad palm rejection - seemingly issues with the touchpad itself, yet become vastly improved when switching the laptop over to Linux, provided that you could use the synaptics driver.

Stuff like trackpad scrolling speed has of course always been configurable system wide on Linux, along with many other features. It's even available in the libinput driver, which (unfortunately) got rid of most of the "knobs" for touchpads.

You may be right; I can't believe it's been 13 years since Microsoft's last go at writing the kernel for it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)). So sad they gave up :(