In System Preferences > General you can set the dock to the left, right or bottom of the screen.

They aren't high end, but if we're comparing to other laptops, $1000 is far from entry level. Entry level is $200-250, and mid-level, probably good machines tend to start around $500; for $1000, you usually get either good specs or nice aesthetics and sometimes both.

Of course, for some users, the $250 laptop has more than enough computing power for their needs (as long as it has a half-decent SSD, cause windows 10, and I assume 11 can't stop thrashing a spinning drive and there goes your perceived performance; I've never dug into it like in this article though, swapping in an SSD is good enough)

There is somewhat of a correlation between price and quality of product. After a certain price, any lower, and you start getting into the “it’s more expensive to be poor” scenarios, where the amortized cost the product over its lifetime ends up higher than the ones that cost more upfront.

I still remember the standard advice of buying a Windows consumer laptop was to reinstall the OS after buying it. In what world should that be acceptable? In my accounting, that time and effort spent installing an OS gets added to the price.

Dell https://www.newegg.com/aluminum-silver-dell-latitude-e6530-m...

Lenovo https://www.newegg.com/p/2WC-000J-01931

Hp https://www.newegg.com/black-hp-stream-pro-11-g5-everyday-va...

Under 200 https://www.newegg.com/black-evoo-ultra-thin/p/1TS-00AY-000D...

Sure, there's some correlation between price and quality, but if you're worried about longevity, 3-4 laptops of questionable quality are likely to last longer than a $1000 laptop anyway. And, screen aside, the 3rd and 4th cheap laptop might end up with better specs than the single quality laptop. If screens are important to you, then that's not going to work, and that's valid; but a lot of people get a fancy hires screen only to run it in 2x mode and push 4x the pixels for a small difference in experience; it's certainly worthwhile for some people, but it doesn't make a big difference to me and many others. In an ideal world, you could pick between screens on a laptop; there's a huge spectrum of screens that meet different needs and wants, but most manufacturers aren't giving options beyond glossy (eww) or matte in a normalish resolution, and on higher priced machines maybe one higher res option with no choice in finish. Sometimes, business oriented laptops will have a couple adjacent sizes available with the same bottom half of the chassis, but that doesn't happen for consumer laptops.

> I still remember the standard advice of buying a Windows consumer laptop was to reinstall the OS after buying it. In what world should that be acceptable? In my accounting, that time and effort spent installing an OS gets added to the price.

A lot of people say a lot of things. Windows works fine out of the box, most of the time. If you want something that values your time, Chrome OS devices are better: works out of the box; cold boots in a couple seconds; no junk (other than google login, but you can run in guest mode if you don't need persistence); updates are done in the background, reboot whenever, none of those long waits at startup to finish stuff like MacOS and Windows. Plus, they start at even lower prices: usually something for $100, something with a mainstream x86 processor around $200.

I want to underline that this is true for what I need out of a laptop.

The opposite has been true in desktops. I have a Ryzen 3900X box and there still isn’t anything from Apple that I would replace it with. Not even to run macOS on it (which I do on the AMD box, using GPU passthrough).

My MacBook Pro 14" is pretty much on-par with my Ryzen 5900X CPU-wise (the M1 Ultra would surpass it by a wide margin). The GPU of the M1 Max is nothing to sneeze at, but I'd love it if they'd bring eGPU support to the M1 line. (And if one can dream, if NVIDIA would also make CUDA available.)

Well, in which tasks?

Comparing e.g. geekbench results for the M1 Ultra https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/14664498 and a decent 5950X (PBO) result https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/14665931 it looks like a lot of Apple's multicore score is attributable to AES (which uses special fixed-function HW). And with other tests, different CPUs win different benchmarks. 5950X notably wins in clang :)

> bring eGPU support to the M1 line

Probably not M1.

marcan tweeted recently that Apple's PCIe integration has been is broken in the same way as on Broadcom's RPi4 SoC — mapping PCIe BARs as normal memory (which allows unaligned access) doesn't work. I can't find the tweet (deleted??) but here's the RPi thread: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss... Basically there's no quick kernel level workaround for this, if you really want a GPU to work on such a broken platform you need to patch every single thing in userspace to avoid unaligned access.

We'll see soon if that's fixed in M2, but I suspect they don't care…