Apple Silicon Macbooks also support Linux.

Oh, by the way in a $450 laptop you can upgrade memory and SSD.

Most MacBooks feel like Pareto-optimal machines. There exist other laptops with better displays, faster CPUs, better speakers, or just cheaper, but I'm pretty sure there are no alternatives with better or equal everything.

My experience buying laptops in 2023 was that most of what I found was cheap junk. Even when I was buying stuff in the $1800-$2500 price range, it was mostly junk with build quality problems, incomplete support for the hardware (USB-C especially being an issue), and terrible thermals.

I don't really like Apple as a company but I just hand them money and they give me a laptop that works without any nonsense. Maybe I'm just too old and overpaid nowadays but I legitimately feel like laptop manufacturers other than Apple are in a self-destructive race-to-the-bottom with each other.

> If you look for non-Apple laptops with equivalent CPU score, they would cost around $450. And they support Linux.

And their battery lasts almost two hours.

And they're made of cheap plastic, have horrible keyboard flexing, and their trackpads suck.

I am envious of gp though, I kind of miss being younger and thinking the only thing that mattered in a laptop was raw CPU/GPU performance.

Artificial benchmarks are interesting but as another personal anecdote, I bought a maxed-out Framework for over $3000 a couple of years ago when I was still Linux desktop oriented. Way more RAM, storage, faster on benchmarks than anything Apple at the time.

It was the worst machine I've ever had. One day after doing yet another plug-unplug-reboot-wtf dance to get a display to work (that just worked the day before) I threw my hands up, went to Best Buy and bought some random basic Macbook Pro for $1200 (lower specs, of course). I don't know what the specs or benchmarks look like, I don't care. I just need a tool to do my work.

What I do know is that it runs for at least weeks at a time, does absolutely everything I need it to do, and I never feel like I'm waiting for it. Plug/unplug displays, thunderbolt docks, open/close the lid, don't charge it for days at time. Just runs along - cool and silent. I open it, get my work done, close it. Day after day.

I absolutely guarantee that even if this Macbook was $6000 I'm way ahead in terms of productivity not to mention stress and frustration - which I value very, very highly.

It's been "Ohhh, this is NICE" experiences like this that have chipped away at my previous thinking and pulled me further and further towards Apple. Still not perfect (of course) but the time I spend fixing my tools vs being productive isn't even close.

I'm probably just getting old and cranky but I have very little patience for BS at this point in my life. When I was 13 figuring out why RedHat 5.2 didn't boot on my AMD K6 was fun. It's not fun anymore.

Performance is not the only meaningful metric when evaluating the total value of a laptop.

Screen, keyboard, build quality, and a whole host of other factors contribute to it.