It is true about phones though, especially when you consider how badly all the big brands except apple and Google add unremovable money making spam apps to their phones.
Literally no other laptop provides a competitive battery life, screen or build even compared to the surface. I literally just bought a new laptop 3 months ago, and almost zero windows laptops were reasonably competitive with the MacBook for a dev.
Could just be because I have a powerful gaming PC, but I definitely found that windows laptops did not meet up to a decent standard.
If you as a consumer buy a nice HP Spectre, it will be more than an equivalent MacBook barring a sale or clearance. I buy 10,000 at a time, and get about 30% off.
A 15" MBA with the max 24GB RAM and a 1TB drive would cost $2100. Note the Zenbook is not on sale, has a 120Hz HiDPI OLED display and aluminum chassis.
In any case, I think the switch from Intel to ARM makes any such comparisons meaningless until we start seeing more ARM-based laptops in the same niche.
ARM and Intel laptops are directly comparable because you can compare what people can do them.
Not all ARM processors are created equal, Apple's are superior in iPhones and laptops, there's no reason to expect that to change in the near future.
Hence the words "in the same niche" in the comment to which you replied.
Plenty of people don't care about how long you can run off the battery or processing per Watt in general, just performance. For those people, there are x86 laptops that can outperform Apple's ARM-based laptops (not to mention having discrete GPI options).
Almost all the benchmarks out there of similarly sized laptops have the M2s (and previously had the M1s) topping the charts in single and multi threaded workloads.
Okay, well
1. Not every Macbook user is a developer
2. Not every developer has no use for a GPU
If we're going to make comparisons about performance requirements for a specific subset of a specific subset of users, then let's be explicit about that. Otherwise, arbitrarily ignoring a rather substantial contributor to overall performance is indeed arbitrary.
I didn't mention size and don't know how they compare. Size comparisons are largely related to processing per Watt because others need bigger heat pipes and fans than the Macs.
I'm basically an Apple guy and don't pay tons of attention to all the alternatives, I just recognize the Apple products are not the right choice for everyone.
Definitely wins on GPU though.
That article also compares models with more expensive add-ons, a lot of that higher Razer price is probably from the 4090. The Blade 16 price starts at $2,699 (i9-13950HX, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, GeForce RTX 4060, 16" 240Hz QHD+). For an MBP with an M2 Max, the 14-inch starts at $3,099 and the 16-inch at $3,499. Those Macs have 32GB RAM and Razer charges +$600 for that much but the Blade has RAM slots, you can buy another 16GB for ~$50. Razer also charges a lot for an upgraded SSD (and absurd +$1,600 for 2TB instead of 1TB) but that is also replaceable at a much more affordable price. There's also a second M2 slot available so you can add storage without replacing the original drive.
Edit: the SSD upgrade cost is so high because they make you get other upgrades with it (a 4090 and 32GB RAM).
[0] https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=&q=Razer+Blade+16+...
You clearly do know what niche I'm referring to, since you just described it. Like you say: Apple's laptops are the sole occupants of their niche, so what would you even compare against? I'm sure there are other ARM chips out there with comparable or better "performance" per Watt, but Apple Silicon's pretty unique right now in maximizing the "performance" half of that equation instead of minimizing the "per Watt" half.
> When shopping for a laptop, there's nothing unfair about comparing ones with different processor architectures when they all can run the software needed.
I never said it was "unfair". I said it was meaningless - because it is. There are myriad metrics by which one could evaluate "performance" (per Watt or otherwise), and Apple Silicon doesn't necessarily win at all of them.
When other manufacturers start putting out ARM laptops targeting the same (or at least remotely similar) performance metrics as a Macbook targets, then there'd be a worthwhile discussion to be had.
Caveat. If windows matters, or you’re talking about the generation of defective MacBooks with a bad keyboard, I’d concede that a top of the line HP, Dell or Lenovo is a better choice.
Honest question: what ecosystem are you referring to? Apple watch? Additional hardware you bought? Or are you talking about software?
Because my guess would have been that Apple users are typically embedded in Google's ecosystem as well (Chrome, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, etc).
And it's not clear to me how using a MacBook would influence your phone choice.
The same reason you use Chrome and then also Google Maps and Gmail. Just swap a Mac with Chrome and an iPhone with Gmail.
There are lots of little features like being able to copy on my iPhone and then it’s saved into a shared clipboard so that I can paste into my Mac. Those kinds of things (there are many, many others and you can look them up for yourself) are why someone would be influenced to choose an iPhone if they are using a Mac.
As an aside I think most users across all platforms use Google’s ecosystem but I would expect Apple users to use it less than others since Apple provides good enough alternatives such as Safari, Apple Maps, iCloud, etc.
Yeah this is what I was thinking. Apple users will tend to use two ecosystems instead of one.
Personally, I wouldn't even think about my laptop when choosing a phone. But I would think about the fact that I use several Google services and I'd rather not duplicate them with Mac accounts/apps.
Now I'm sure all of these things are possible on other platforms using extra software but in the ecosystem it's all zero setup, instantly integrated and quite reliable.
Girls absolutely covet iphones like sacred cows. some go as far as to not date guys who use android. its weird but I've seen it myself.
"Quierro un iphone!!"
its definitely not an american only thing
For me, an iPhone is better than any Android phone. I don’t know why this is surprising to many people.
iPhone -> pragmatism
And as a professional developer that uses a mac (that is by far the best bang for the buck if you're not into gaming) it just makes sense to pick an iphone instead of an android due to the ecosystem value. I doubt many people in developed countries care that much about the fact that you use an apple device or not, that's the kind of shit you'd expect from developing nations like Brazil (where I'm from), where they do remain a status symbol mostly because the population in general is still pretty poor.