> I personally can't find the extra value for double the money in macs

I'm sure the resale value is much, much higher. I purchased my very first iPhone, an iPhone 13 pro, largely due to the fact that it will still be worth a significant amount after 2 or 3 years.

If you take that into account, the difference probably isn't as noticeable.

Just looking at spec sheets, you won't find the value. It's in everything that's hard to measure but provides real benefit.

I tried to use Lenovo and I see the value in double the money.

Although I’d probably just buy a 3 year old Air for 800euro rather than buy a new one at that price point.

For durability, I would expect that old Air to last longer than a brand new Lenovo.

I have a Lenovo Legion for games and Macs for work. Why don’t I use Lenovo for both? It’s heavy, has crappy battery life, and sometimes makes fan noise even when idle (because it’s running hot). If Mac could run my Steam library I wouldn’t even bother with Windows devices.

I mean, you can get a light and thin Surface laptop. But it’s in the same price range as Macs. But M2 definitely beats Intel on battery life.

Apple: 500 nits display, whole working day battery, fans almost never on, much higher resale value. Might be worth for some people.

That combined with the best speakers you will ever hear in a laptop, keyboard and touchpad you know will be at least decent (ye olde butterfly notwithstanding), the steep price tag kind of sort of starts to partially make a bit more sense.

The price is still stupid, but a potential customer not needing to give a crap about his new computer might just make the steep price worth it.

Why would I care about laptop speakers? 1600 EUR gives me plenty of room to get a normal laptop, Harman-kardon soundsticks plus top-end Sennheiser headphones. No matter how good laptop speakers are, they won't even be near the ones mentioned.

You've clearly never sat on a couch with a Mac on your lap.

The speakers on a mac are better than headphones? ...REALLY?!

The point was that the combined value of all these features are rarely matched in any other laptop in this price range. Superior speakers were just one of the things.

Sure, I get the general point, but that isn't where it went. It went into the usual tiresome mac hyperbole.

You're the one that changed "near" to "better" out of nowhere.

But I think they were also talking about the overall convenience-quality tradeoff.

You need speakers to drown out the noisy fan?

I think "commodity" laptop manufacturers have successfully tricked people into thinking a laptop is a collection of integers (16gb RAM, N core processor, etc) but I have NEVER used a laptop even close to as performant as the m1 and m1 ultra based macbook pros. You really have to experience it to believe it, it literally never lags no matter what or is ever unresponsive regardless of what i'm doing. Not to mention the full day battery life or anything else like that

It's definitely more complicated than that for most components, but a 256GB SSD you can't upgrade yourself is ridiculous.

I think the key problem is anchoring from low-end prices.

If a laptop makes an employee 1% more efficient, that has returns of $2k/year to the employer for an employee whose cost is $200k/year. Note that cost >> salary, so this corresponds to perhaps a $100k salary.

Reliability is king. A failed device will typically cost thousands of dollars in lost productivity, IT costs, etc. A device which fails at a critical moment can have almost arbitrary costs.

From a business perspective, Apple, Latitude / Precision / XPS, and Thinkpads are usually the only devices which make sense.

From a home perspective, there are plenty of $200 machines which get the job done. That's one of Apple's problems.

Another one is that most businesses spent a lot on upgrades during COVID, and those machines are still within their lifecycle. As we're entering a predicted recession, delaying upgrades is the #1 thing to go. Layoffs also mean there's a glut of machines (there's a ton of nice off-lease stuff on refurbished web sites right now at bottom-barrel prices; I saw a Precision laptop with 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Xeon, and NVidia Tesla for under $500 a few weeks back).

16GB is objectively better than 8GB in every way even if you compare across platforms, so yes it is correctly a numbers game

16>8 but how you use 16 vs 8 also matters a lot (I.e., the OS)

Doesn't the clockspeed of the RAM and the distance to the CPU matter?

> it literally never lags no matter what or is ever unresponsive regardless of what i'm doing

That's more the OS scheduling and userspace software than actual hardware. I don't experience any lag even on my father's 10yr old laptop.

The only difference is that the MacBook Pro has a higher refresh rate and a good SSD. Having used both I assure you a modern "N core" processor with 16gb of RAM, a fast NVMe SSD and a high refresh rate screen feels just as responsive as the latest MacBook Pro.

That's fine but after experiencing the insane battery life of M1 I will not use another brand unless they somehow manage to beat apple silicon, which I hope they do but they have such an advantage.

Some people from the Apple M1 team left to start Nuvia, which was acquired by Qualcomm and will hopefully be bringing comparable performance-per-watt to PC OEM Arm Windows/Linux laptops in 2024.

I had a Lenovo with double-battery and about 18 hours of autonomy, so it's not impossible to get that at a discount.

Lmao how much does that weigh?

A lot :/

Which is fine if you’re mostly stationary but for someone who travels a lightweight and performant laptop with all-day battery is a game changer. Only Apple has that at the moment.

Well no that particular laptop have been my mainstay for 7 years of mobility, and ran 7 years vertically on a stand, so Apple would have broken way before that Lenovo. Notwistanding the price.

It doesn't have to weigh a lot. The max battery you can get for regulatory reasons is 99 watt hours and that's slightly more than a pound.

For their low-end lines, but not something like an X1