My hunch is that relaxing this seemingly arbitrary requirement will result in many suitable notebooks

You do realize we had 1440p phones in 2015-2016 right?

HiDPI is not new, and it's clarity amazing. Stop buying huge low res screens for ripoff prices in 2025

Stop limiting yourself to 60hz in 2025

I had an XPS 15 with 4k display in 2016, yet in 2025 it’s somehow difficult to find a laptop with that pixel density?

I wonder the same with phones actually, my Nexus 6P from 2015 (10 years ago!) had an amazing 518 ppi display. When the modem died I got a Pixel 2 which had only 441 ppi, and the display was a really noticeable downgrade, text looked significantly uglier, I could see the pixels and hinting artifacts again. I expected high pixel densities to become mainstream to the point where every screen has a density at the limit of what the human eye can perceive, yet here we are 10 years later, and Google’s flagship phones have only 495/486 ppi, worse than the Nexus 6P!

I'm holding my phone as close as I can to my face and I can't see a pixel if I want to

Maybe check out the Framework laptops? For example the Framework 13's new screen is 2.8k @ 256PPI apparently [1], which has slightly more pixels than the Macbook Air M4[2] (obviously pixels isn't everything), but you can get up to 8TB NVMe storage + an extra storage expansion cards if you're happy to sacrifice ports and up to 96GB RAM. [3]

[1] https://community.frame.work/t/framework-laptop-13-deep-dive...

[2] https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/

[3] https://frame.work/gb/en/products/laptop-diy-13-gen-amd/conf...

EDIT: typo + formatting

Battery life is the main downside, although it doesn't bother me too much — running manufacturer-supported Linux is very nice and worth having to charge more frequently. It uses USB-C anyway, so it's just one cable for all my devices — doesn't feel like that big of a deal.

Which to be honest, is fine -- plenty of people want something different from a MacBook Air, whether it is the ability to run Windows or Linux without compromises (tho VMs on Apple silicon are pretty good, it's not going to be ideal for everyone), the ability to upgrade storage, or just wanting repairability.

But the battery life on a MBA is not something Framework or any of the Windows laptops can compete with right now. I thought we might get there with Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips last year -- and maybe the next iteration will (and ARM64 chips have their own trade-offs for Windows and Linux (whereas if you're committed to Mac, those trade-offs don't exist anymore)) -- but right now, unfortunately, Mac is where it is at for the true all-day performance and battery place.

Even there, however, I would specify that it is the MacBook Airs that have the best battery life. My 16" M4 Pro with 48GB of RAM has great battery too -- don't get me wrong. But my original 14" M1 Max and the 14" M3 Max I replaced it with both have exceptional battery life for what they can do, but I can definitely drain that battery in under 5 hours if I'm working on it hard enough. Whereas the Air just lasts and lasts and lasts.

The chips may not have the lanes, but they have the bandwidth if only 10GbE / 4xm.2 / storage controllers could plug in. I wonder if power is an issue.

If I usually worked from cafes, or spent many hours a day working on planes or trains, all-day battery life would be at the top of my list. But I usually work in workspaces that have power, so... It would definitely be nice to have better battery life, but other features are higher priority for me.

- Longer cycles means cycle count accruement and thus degradation is slower (sometimes dramatically so)

- For longer trips, charging can be done overnight with a tiny trickle-charging phone brick, which is also better for battery health

- No need to bring a brick, cable, or power bank for shorter trips

- Impact of phantom drain during standby is greatly mitigated

- Laptop will more often than not have enough charge to be used whenever you pick it up, without having to leave it plugged in all the time

- Bluetooth and wifi can be used liberally without fear of chewing through battery too quickly

- You as a user spend a lot less time thinking about your laptop’s battery

There’s also secondary effects, like a machine being efficient enough to have long battery life generally also reducing its heat output and making it more practical to keep cool with a slow fan or passive heatsink.

My Framework and my HP Spectre (that I bought last year) both perform differently if they aren't plugged in and both make more noise than a MacBook Air. Whereas my MacBook Pros are usually silent (tho they can def turn the fan on if I'm pushing them a lot) and I can definitely run the battery down, but I never have to worry about having to have it plugged in just so I can do what I want without worries.

And on Windows anyway (Linux power management is its own nightmare), having to triage to figure out "how much time do I have before I have to move to a different seat in an airport lounge or find a plug at a coffee shop or snoop around at an office if I'm not at a set desk" to make sure I have enough time left to make that video call is like not a small thing.

Yeah, you can often find a plug -- but a) sometimes those plugs don't work. and b) sometimes the effort to find and look for one really interrupts your flow, versus just being able to to trust that my laptop has enough power to operate.

Carrying around a charging brick sucks. Now you have to get a table at the cafe by the wall. Or hope the airplane power is functional.

I want to bring my laptop to work, not think about charging it, and not worry about what I'm doing on the laptop throughout the day (video calls, compiling, etc.)

I've heard Windows defaults or more advanced Linux games can do better, but at this stage I don't feel the need.

Give it a read and do a simulation of how much it would cost you to replace the part that forced you to buy a new laptop.

The ThinkPad X1 and Framework 13 have a much lower resolution display. Also, I appreciate Framework’s mission, but it’s not the build quality that I’m looking for.

This is a thing right? You come back to your computer, and it’s exactly as you left it. It didn’t try to magically reboot because of overnight updates, it didn’t prevent you from starting a program because it phoned home to the mothership and it told them that particular dev hasn’t forked over their $100 yet. It’ll tell you there are updates and ask if you want to install them.

It’s such a relief to work on something not windows or mac in so many ways.

If you choose the custom build route some even can ship with Fedora or Ubuntu, so presumably Linux support is reasonable.

There are also plenty of other P-series thinkpads that you can get with 2 TB or more storage: P14s, P16, P16v

> everything I want in a sleek 14" or 15" device

The X1 carbon we have in our house has a 13” 16:9 screen, which I hate.

Or pick up a Framework 13 which has a 13.5" 2880x1800 16:10 screen: https://frame.work/products/laptop-diy-13-gen-amd/configurat...

Ah, that is an excellent improvement!

The worst problem is they are Intel-only so I moved to T14s which is not as polished (their premium AMD option is too MacBook-like with sharp edges and worse keyboard in Z13 or something), yet AMD is much closer to Macs on thermals, battery life and performance.

It feels plasticky (magnesium chassis T/P-series belong to the ages) but it's a damn sight more computer than I could get from Apple for that money. Well, apart from the battery life, RAM bandwidth, OS-hardware integration, and build quality. It's more RAM than I could get from Apple for that money, for sure.

The battery live is the Macs killer feature. Not sure if it would be ass good with Asahi. I'm not using MacOS.

The Apple build quality is good, but I honestly do not like to handle to cold slippy smooth aluminum body.

I shall take a good lesson from your case and keep my ThinkPad in its Pelican case whenever I'm not using it. Can't afford to be laptopless for months!

I held out on Mac for 20 yrs, no idea what I was thinking.

I spent weeks last year trying to decide what to get to replace a MBP M2, and while Lenovo's offering was good for enterprise consumers, there was very few laptops with decent perfs and HiDPI screen in a practical form factor.

I think for anyone not caring about gaming perf, the Microsoft Surface line is way ahead of anything Lenovo has to offer.

For better perf Asus had a better lineup, and we get form factors like the X13 or Z13 which are just excelent in day to day use (now if only they made 32 or 64G a standard option for all their "gaming" machines I'd have no notes).

I kept a mac for backup, but am seriously waiting for Apple to make more drastic moves (finally a real iPad computer ?) before ever going back.

I say 2012 is the dividing line because that's when they released the Yoga, which was a big step in a new direction. I actually owned multiple Yogas, and didn't hate some of them, but they had nothing in common with Thinkpads. In 2012 they also released the X230, which was more locked down than the X220, which the enthusiast community hated. The decline after 2012 was sort of slow - I bought a T440p (released 2014) after my X230 got stolen and I found it was pretty decent, certainly pretty durable - but Lenovo's main focus had clearly shifted towards the new and shiny.

These days they're just another Windows laptop OEM, which is to say: built and engineered like crap, weirdly expensive for what you get, horribly ugly, software full of ads and spyware and AI bullshit, disposable after a few years. The M1 Air was released 5 years ago this year and I still use two on a daily basis for serious tasks; I'll probably be using them years into the future too. They're not really repairable, but they do last. Any five year old Windows laptop is slow as a dog, has small plastic parts breaking off of it, looks somehow even shittier than it did originally, and of course is full of adware and garbage.

Anyway, that's all to say: yes, in 2025 Lenovo is overhyped, but that's just reputational inertia from many years where they were genuinely good.

Thanks!

Look the modularity and repairability is nice, and I like how it addresses e-waste. However regarding modularity, I would rather have more fixed ports than a choice of changeable ones.

My biggest gripe is battery life, in Linux I can only seem to get 4 hours of usage and that's if I'm lucky. More like 2.5 to 3 hours, and that's usually minimal usage.

My second biggest gripe is the hinges in the laptop. WHen I pick up the laptop with the screen erect at the 90 degree position, it usually falls flat 180 degrees. How this even got past QA annoys me, and the fix is to buy a new hinge kit, but that costs $30 AUD plus $40 AUD shipping, so basically a ripoff.

The keyboard is actually quite decent, but I would've preferred Macbook layout with the fn on the left and half-size inverted T arrow keys. I was hoping a 3rd party would make the keyboard, but the reality is not many 3rd parties are making FW stuff.

The modular ports can be erratic when powering on the laptop, sometimes a usb port doesn't register and I have to eject and reinsert the modular ports, which is annoying.

The display is fine, except mine developed a thin grey line that's noticeable when the pixels aren't lit up. I take care of my laptop carefully, but I feel like this display is weaker than most. Thankfully it's not noticeable when the screen is bright. I also find the screen overly glossy that I had to buy a matte screen protector and apply it, but I believe in newer models you can get a matte display.

The webcam is fine. The speakers are trash. The mic is okay. The trackpad is okayish (for what you can get out of Linux anyways).

Just feels mediocre all around.

OTOH Macbook Air not only runs cool even when you build stuff on it, but somehow manages to do so without any fans.

I buy gaming laptops because they're the only powerful laptops and their size has never bothered me when traveling

Just how heavy is your laptop?

You need a better backpack I think? I regularly carry 10kg of groceries in my backpack over two kilometers. It never gave me any back pain.

Carrying a heavy backpack can be practiced. It does not hurt your back.

People complain they can't lift shit but don't do anything besides taking anti pain pill.

The secret to growing well is avoiding processed food, cardio 30 min per day minimum and weight lifting.

I do use an Osprey 22L hiking backpack for my daily driver, it's got a waist belt to transfer weight to my hips, a chest strap to keep the shoulder straps together, and internal semi-rigid frame... but that's more for all my other stuff, and for activities I do in the woods far from stuff like 'laptop computers'. Even if it's just in a handheld briefcase, 3 kg is not a lot. That's about as much as a water bottle - which I also have in the backpack, as well as a bunch of miscellaneous stuff that also weighs a few kg.

I herniated a disk a couple years ago due to a waterskiing accident, but I've fully recovered and even while dealing with that injury, walking around airports and so forth with any laptop is not not strenuous.

In hindsight, I wish I'd gone for the big P73, I miss the giant 17" screen of my old 40mm thick, 3.5 kg Dell Precision... but the OLED on the P53 is beautiful. 17" UHD OLED when, Lenovo?

1) Is 99% of the time actually on my lap when I'm using it. It's (usually) the one I take with me when I leave the house. I care very, very much about its size and weight. It's an M1 Air and I wouldn't mind if it was a bit smaller/lighter.

2) Is 99% of the time sitting on my desk, plugged into my KVM. It almost never leaves my house. I don't care how bulky it is. However, I prefer medium-ish form factors in case I do need to travel with it.

Any laptops I have over 2 will usually be in the 2nd bin, but sometimes the 1st.

I have a gaming laptop, even 14", and I can't stand the boot up time and needing a thick power brick cable to get things going. I barely use it as a result and use my Steam Deck more.

Most of my friends assume the default mode of transport globally is a car. Even to get to a cafe or library.

Pretty funny when you think about it.

This is disingenuous. It's not a problem, just less desirable.

I'd usually unplug it if I had to move to another room and only bring the laptop itself.

Even an Air is too heavy IMO compared to say an LG Gram. But, I need the specs and the screen so I lug around a MacBook Pro 16" at 4.6lbs - often I have to lug around 2, my corp one and my personal one.

Given an iPad Pro 13" is 1.3lbs they "could" (for some definition of "could") make a 16" device with keyboard closer to 2 lbs.

I can do the same work on a MacBook Air when I'm away, and it's basically just a desktop when I'm home. To me it would make way more sense to have a desktop at home and a 12 - 14" laptop, if it wasn't for the cost of having both.

Or the Intel Lunar Lake processor.

Both have extremely good laptop options - the Lenovo Yoga Aura edition is pretty much macbook quality.

And runs LLMs (https://github.com/intel/ipex-llm/blob/main/docs/mddocs/Over...)

Mobile. A lot of games I played as a kid have mobile apps, and in some cases, I don't know if its the case for all of them, the userbase is mostly on their phones. I can only imagine this is the case for a lot of things.

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/microsoft-surfac...

Wtf is with the downvotes? It literally hits every requirement he had, and the surface laptops are some of the best windows/nix laptops on the market.

I also run a custom Windows desktop and a synology NAS, so I like to consider myself mostly agnostic.

And yes, the screen is slightly lower DPI (201 VS 226) but you do get a better aspect ratio in return.

If you want a nix experience, Linux support is still a WIP and progress is quite slow because of a lack of help from Snapdragon and OEMs. I expect that it might take a generation or two to get it to the point where it was with the x86 SLs.

However, at this stage, I'm tired of the quirks of Windows so the lack of nix support pushed me to get the Macbook Air for myself.

I am between Lenovo X1 Aura, MSI Prestige 13, and this. All have Lunar Lake so battery life should be exceptional, except of course if there are any issues with battery drain during sleep on Linux. Definitely spoiled by Apple not having battery drain issues, but would love pointers on how to solve it.

I think it appears large for a couple of reasons. First is that Mac screens are much closer to 3K than 4K. You can find tons of really nice 14" 3K laptops so the gap is pretty much negligible there, especially if you consider how cheap you can get 3K OLEDs on Windows PCs nowadays. Second is that many companies try to limit SKUs for their off-the-shelf products and 2TB or 4TB apparently aren't moving units. People who really want that model can just go buy a bigger drive to drop into it.

That said, one last thing to consider is that while 14" Macbooks are very capable for their footprint, they are heavier and thicker than some other options. If weight is the concern there are 16" laptops that are thinner and lighter than the 14" macbook. The LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1 weighs 0.5lbs less and is 0.10" thinner than an MBP14 and has two ssd slots.

You are discounting the quality of a Macbook screen without understanding how it differs from competitors. A Macbook is the only laptop on the market that accurately reproduces colors out of the box to an extent that is sufficient for color grading photographs or video. I'm a hobbyist photographer and primarily do editing on a desktop where I have LG and Ezio displays that are color accurate, but when I'm out and about there is no alternative on the market I can buy other than a Macbook, because while on paper the "resolution" of other laptops may be similar or even superior, in actuality they are somewhat between shit-tier and D tier in actual color reproduction and quality. Macbook displays are MASSIVELY better than anything any other laptop offers at any price point non-Apple.

I previously used a mixture of different laptops and have over the course of time shifted to using Macbooks for everything because the performance, battery life, power efficiency, display quality, software availability, and annoyance minimization advantages are so large for Apple that it makes no sense to use anything else, except perhaps Linux just to use Linux (which I do on a Framework 13 for personal tinkering projects). I don't see how anyone can honestly recommend that anybody purchase a non-Apple laptop in 2025 for any purpose other than tinkering with Linux, in which case the Frameworks are great.

There's obviously a cost to that superiority and not everyone can afford it, but that doesn't mean alternatives are /preferable/. They clearly are not, they are a trade-off in every single aspect. Even in the case of weight that you mentioned, that trade-off is in durability, the Macbook weighs more because it has an entirely metal chassis and most non-Apple laptops are cheap plastic monstrosities.

Software availability is worse for me, as ARM still causes problems. The AMD CPU are pretty nice.

The ThinkPad still have some advantages to me. There are some design choices I much prefer. Granted, when recommending to other people, they likely wouldn't value those same things.

I bought a ThinkPad recently, just as I have done for 15+ years now. At the same price point I would say its at least competitive.

But yeah, if Linux on M-Series continues to make progress, maybe I would would consider it. I'm not using MacOS as I daily driver.

I got one from Lenovo with OLED, came pre-calibrated, running X-Rite calibration gave minimal gains.

  * sRGB < AdobeRGB ~= DCI-P3 < Rec.2020

My coworker has one. It will probably be my next portable workstation.

Plastic case?

You've got my curiosity..

> Oh, and battery life is 14-16 hours of use.

Oh. Now you've got my attention!

Panasonic Let's Note. Your welcome.

It's repairable, upgradable, and has a *removable battery* (unheard of in 2025).

Frankly, I'm not sure why people think that laptops with CNCed aluminium chassis are the pinnacle of build quality.

Since the M series chips, there's been no other option if you care about quality. There are crappy alternatives with serious tradeoffs if for some reason you are forced to not use Apple or choose for non-quality reasons.

I have an M3 Pro and it blows all my old computers out of the water. Can handle pretty insane dev workflows (massive Docker composed environments) without issue and the battery life feels unfair. I can put in an 8 hour workday without my charging cable, I don't think I have turned it fully off in a few months, it just chugs along. It really embodies the "it just works" mindset.

I honestly looked for alternatives when I bought it last summer but there weren’t any competitive options.

AMD did catch up quickly, it's too bad they had to solder RAM to match but it is what it is...

It is true though that in terms of laptops my only experience to compare it with was with intel chips, but that's because it used to be hard to find an AMD laptop back then.

Also a Windows machine with WSL isn't the worst thing, just treat it well.

The test itself is simple: a Puppeteer script that loads the Reddit front page and scrolls it at 50 px/s for 10 minutes, in a loop until the battery dies. This actually produces a fairly decent load including video decoding (because Reddit autoplays by default, and there are plenty videos in the feed). I also had Thunderbird, Discord, and Telegram running in the background.

On Windows 11, the battery dies in 500 minutes.

On Linux Mint 21.3, it dies in 200 minutes.

Now, this is because Chrome (and Firefox!) disable GPU-accelerated rendering by default on Linux due to "unstable drivers". To be fair, it really is unstable - when I enabled it and watched the test as it was going, I saw the Firefox tab in a crashed state more than once. But even then, with Firefox + GPU acceleration, I got 470 minutes of battery life on Windows vs 340 minutes on Linux.

It’s bigger problem was it was far too eager to trigger the dGPU, especially with accelerated graphics in browsers and the like. So I ended up running it in integrated only mode, unless I wanted to play games.

If I close my lid with 100% battery at the end of the workday, I should be able to open it up the next morning and get at least a few hours of work in before the battery dies.

And this used to work.

But with the same laptop, a certain version of windows has basically eliminated any benefits of shutting the laptop hinge.

Heck the worst part is the same thing happens even if you shut down windows. The only reason it’s now become usable for me is because I learnt if you do shift + power off that does a real shutdown, unlike a regular shutdown.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/09/m1-macbook-battery-life/

Nowadays I am looking forward to the Nvidia digits+ MacBook Pro duo.

The amount of cooling and power required for such a PC versus the aluminum slab with small fans that almost never turn on is a testament to the insanely good engineering of the M series chips.

I compile large c++ codebases on a daily basis, but the M3 Max never makes me feel like I can “grab a cup of coffee”.

What brand?

2k buys you a decent thread ripper or 59xx series and as much ram as you can throw at it.

I bought the system mostly to increase the single core performance from the Ryzen 5 3600 I had before. As well as to get rid of all the little 256GB SSD disks I had in the previous one.

EDIT: Also, I know the code in the link is awful; the point is doing a 1:1 comparison between the architectures.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/stephanGarland/f6b7a13585c0caf9eb64b...

Mac laptops feel faster, even if the synthetic benchmarks say otherwise.

That said, I’ve never once felt that the M3 MBPs are sluggish. They are definitely super quick machines. And the fact that I can go a full day without charging even when using moderately heavy workloads is truly jaw droppingly impressive.

I’d definitely take the power performance over that small little extra saved in compile times any day of the week. So Apple have made some really smart judgements there.

My M1 still holds right up! It is the smallest RAM model, and even that is not the end of things.

I’ve gone entire work days with my Pro on battery because I didn’t notice I hadn’t plugged it in. All my docker containers, IDE etc plugged into my external monitor. It was a good 9hrs before I noticed.

Macs are easy to beat depending on what trade offs you want to make though.

And for data centers, same performance at better power efficiency means hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in power.

I could get 7+ hours from my work Linux laptops battery and I don’t really care for macOS. The OS quality matters more than the touch pad to me. I’ve come the appreciate a Mat screen. But im glad there is choice.

Apple is better because of actual superior technology. The chips are custom made and no one can match the technology yet.

I'll bow out here because I can just tell this won't be a worthwhile thread.

Back when Apple used Intel processors, they were at the mercy of Intel's roadmap; if Intel missed a deadline for a new chip, Apple had to change plans. Obviously, that's no longer the case.

Back in the Motorola/IBM days, their G5 processor ran so hot that Apple had to create a special case with 7 fans to cool it. It was an amazing engineering feat, but something Apple would never do unless they had no choice. I've used a Power Mac G5—it sounded like a jet taking off, and the fans stayed on. [2]

They get to integrate new technologies quicker than being constrained by the industry.

Apple launched the first 64-bit smartphone, the iPhone 5s, in 2013—at least a year before any Android manufacturer could. And when Qualcomm finally shipped a 64-bit processor, no version of Android supported it. [1]

There are dozens of examples where Apple's vertical integration has allowed them to stay a step ahead of competitors.

The latest is the C1 modem that shipped in the iPhone 16e. Because the C1 is much more efficient than Qualcomm's modem, the 16e gets better battery life than the more expensive iPhone 16 with Qualcomm's modem. [3]

And because Qualcomm's licensing fees are a percentage of the cost of the device it's in, shipping the C1 enables them to put modems in laptops. The Qualcomm fee is significant: an iPad Air starts at $599; the same iPad Air model with one of Qualcomm's modems costs $749.

Customers have wanted MacBooks with cellular modems forever; now they'll be able to do that, since the modem will become part of Apple's SoC in the near future.

That's what you can do when you're not constrained by off-the-shelf components.

[1]: "First 64-bit Android phone has no 64-bit software"—https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/first-64-bit-android...

[2]: https://thehouseofmoth.com/a-little-known-fact-about-the-pow...

[3]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/02/27/apples-c1-modem-b...

- The integrated on-chip RAM dramatically speeds up memory access. Your full 16 GB of RAM on an M1 functions at cache speeds; meanwhile, the L3 cache on an Intel processor is 1-8M, more than 3 orders of magnitude smaller.

- Apple takes full advantage of this with their software stack. Objective C and Swift use reference counting. The advantage of refcounting is that it doesn't have slow GC pauses, but the disadvantage is that it has terrible locality properties (requiring that you update refcounts on all sorts of different cache lines when you assign a variable) which often make it significantly slower on real-world Intel hardware. But if your entire RAM operates at cache speeds, this disadvantage goes away.

- Refcounting is usually significantly more memory-efficient than GC, because with the latter you need to set aside empty space to copy objects into, and as that space fills up your GC becomes significantly less efficient. This lets Apple apps get more out of smaller overall RAM sizes. The 16GB on an M1 would feel very constraining on most modern Wintel computers, but it's plenty for Apple software.

- The OS is aware of the overall system load, and can use it to determine whether to use the performance or efficiency cores, and to allocate workloads across cores. The efficiency cores are very battery-efficient; that's why Macbooks often have multiple times the battery life of Windows laptops.

- The stock apps are all designed to take advantage of efficiencies in the OS and not do work that they don't need to, which again makes them faster and more battery efficient.

Yes and: (as you know) Aggregate volume also benefits Apple's whole product suite.

It's hard for a laptop mfg to justify pushing to next node process for just ~25m units. So competitors have to wait for Qualcomm, Samsung, whomever to transition.

It's easier for Apple with ~250m phones, ~50m tablets, ~25m laptops, etc. per year. (Apple's war chest also enables monosopoly of upcoming node processes.)

Imagine trying to pull off AirPods or Vision without that deep vertical integration. The ridiculously ambitious Vision is just barely feasible, riding on mobile's coattails. A Vision using 3rd party CPUs would be delayed.

--

This all is in addition to the Apple specific optimizations, which you mention.

We get what we pay for.

Most people buying an entry level computer these days should at least consider stretching to get a MBA than the $300-400 shovelware, they’ll get so much use out of it.

My wife is still using her 2020 M1 Air and it’s still as snappy as the day we got it, still works for all her use cases.

Incredible value.

I don't think that expecting everyone to waste 3x the money to scratch the same itch is an informed take, specially when the $300 shovelware has far better specs in terms of RAM and by far HD.

Nowadays you can even get better performing miniPCs for half the price than your MacBook Air M3, such as any of the systems packing a AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS.

I think some people look at the shiny computers and don't look past that.

This is a stupid comparison: even a Mac mini pretty much fulfills this, since the M4 is a step up from the M3 and the actively-cooled mini can sustain higher performance than the passively-cooled MacBook Air, and at about half the price of an M3 MacBook Air.

Ah! my early 2015 13" Macbook pro died only few weeks back. I don't think any other laptop will last nearly 10 years (TBF I did replace the battery and speakers for $280 in 2020 though)

and a pleasure to work with

I am sad that the resale value didn't hold as much as people claim Apple products do, but that’s because of the overpriced storage mostly

Looks like I can get $2500 vs the $7600 I paid for it

So rolling over into a newer maxed out model isnt so easily rationalized

I’d be tempted to buy a used machine with more RAM because I’ve had really good experiences with used electronics like laptops or phones.

BTW I have Apple Intelligence turned off but I’m not prepared to say it won’t ever be useful for anybody.

I don't see the current US leadership wanting to put that in jeopardy.

What do you think it is then?

It isn't, and it's amusing how people get riled with a simple request to justify why dismissed someone else's opinion without presenting a single argument.

> I think you and most people would agree on the immense utility of Apple products.

They are consumer electronics, and laptop manufacturers are a dime a dozen. Why do you believe they are special in that regard? I mean, until recently they even shipped with a below-standard amount of RAM.

> There’s also no evidence that demand increases with price in MacBooks.

That's the definition of a Veblen good, something that is not known for being useful beyond serving as a status symbol.

I don't think you understood the Veblen good definition. And MacBooks do not fit the definition. The parent comment explained it well.

I love it though and I believe there is no better alternative. Everything else is just the shit without the nice package.

That's orthogonal to the concept of a Veblen good. A Veblen good can very much be shit wrapped in cellophane.

The core trait of a Veblen good is that customers buy it as a status symbol. Also, being overpriced contributes to reduce the number of those who can afford to buy one.

One could easily put together a significantly more powerful Linux desktop for a lower price. This has always been the case, but Apple's marketing tries to convince you otherwise. Honestly, I've always been surprised by how effectively their marketing has misled the tech-savvy crowd on HN.

But if you don’t want Apple, or you want to be able to upgrade, check out Frameworks. [1]

Really satisfying combination of quality and value for high performance laptops.

[1] https://frame.work/

Plus you get the benefits of loading out your laptop with 64GB RAM etc without paying Apples ridiculous prices

Snapdragon are just getting started. The Snapdragon X2 is coming out later this year with 18 cores

Apple does have some serious competition now

If RAM is all you need on a M_ air type of machine sure, but the selling/buying point of apple silicon's unified memory is mainly around GPU/memory bandwidth at a low energy consumption level, which is yet to be rivaled (maybe AMD recently took steps towards there). If one's workload optimises for CPU-only and very high RAM, apple silicon was and probably will be the worst choice cost-wise.

Also, for me, the no-no reason for snapdragon x elites until now is having to use windows, plus, as it turned out, the early unreliability of the actual products sold by laptop manufacturers.

But the market has opened up, so prob we will see more competition towards there, which is great. Apple's good but not doing anything magic that others cannot eventually do to some extent. Though I am far more optimistic for AMD than Qualcomm tbh.

How on earth are there literally ZERO non Apple laptops with a trackpad as smooth as Apple’s?

This is an old technology. Surely someone must have reverse engineered this by now?

My guess is typical PC manufacturers have not felt it worth the time to invest in getting this aspect right.

Ironically, the best non windows trackpad I ever used was when Vizio tried to make computers. They actually got the trackpad right. In fact, those computers were really cut above everyone else, but my guess is they didn't sell well because they were taken off the market almost as fast as they were introduced

Apple has also learned a ton about how to do this well from the iPhone.

For example, the Precision touchpad, which was the first actual touchpad tech MS created, with Windows previously testing touchpads as mouses, has been released for a little more than a decade.

Touchpads had been around for over 4 decades and have been standard to laptops since the mid to late 90s.

And the worst part is that MS still allows hardware vendors to ship non Precision touchpads today.

MS won’t allow you to run windows 10, but vendors can ship touchpads that only support decades old software.

It’s very hard to get Windows manufacturers to pay attention to the touchpad when MS itself isn’t interested.

Unfortunately, the Windows domination in the non Apple part of the industry means that serious change is only driven by MS.

A lot of advantages we think Apple has due to vertical integration are more because MS is pretty terrible

Microsoft tried to prevent crapware from being installed by OEMs a while back and got blocked.

What you’re describing is the effect of not controlling the stack and the only way to really do that is by doing it yourself.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/scc/scr/laptops/appref=xps-p... ?

Sure doesn't seem to be discontinued at all?

And just checking the XPS 14 it has both 2tb and 4tb storage options, and the 3.2k OLED screen is higher resolution than what Apple's 14" offering contains and it's 120hz.

Current models at the time of the announcement may still be produced and then inventories depleted, but those will be the last of them.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the thinkpad x1 extreme laptop. It was basically the lenovo/thinkpad response to the xps 15. It's way thinner than the ThinkPad T16/P15 lines.

they claim it's a 16" laptop but only because they made the bezel smaller enough to fit a larger display in the same space.

it's usually mostly on par with the dell xps but i'm not sure about the specs though... my personal laptop is a rusty thinkpad x270 (i'm torn between the newly announced m4 macbook air or the upcoming framework 12) and i've been issued a m3 macbook pro for work.

I just checked https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/t... and it says the laptop has two ddr5 slots, i guess you could load up to 128gb in there using the newest 64gb sticks.

Used to be primarily a Linux on the desktop user, but have been on macOS since the M1 air, and now typing this from a 14" M4 Pro MBP that will probably last me the next 5+ years easily.

I don't love macOS but it's usable, I pretty much live in the terminal anyway, and the ecosystem features are nice - I make heavy use of clipboard sharing between my laptop and phone, iMessage, and universal control with my iPad that's on my desk.

There's just no other laptop on the market that has this combination of aesthetics, performance, thermals (this thing is cool and silent), screen quality, top notch speakers and microphone for a laptop, and unmatched trackpad. Let alone anything that'll run Linux without some headaches.

I had hopes for the Snapdragon X elite laptops, but no Linux still, and they still don't hold a candle to the Macbooks.

It says a lot that probably the best in the space is the humble Raspberry Pi.

Pi laptop with the most cursory audio I/O? I'm there. Not to live, but to support as a first class production option. There's something very 'sailboat with solar panel' about 'em.

Here is what I am using right now from my fastfetch:

Display (SDC4193): 2880x1800 @ 90Hz [Built-in]

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics (16) @ 5.13 GHz'

GPU: AMD Device 15BF (VGA compatible) @ 0.80 GHz [Integrated]

Memory: ---- GiB / 58.51 GiB

Disk (/): ---- TiB / 1.82 TiB

You can even go cheaper and get a slower CPU as far as I know. And for that price apple doesn't give out that much RAM.

What requirement you have is not meet here?

I'm not a fan of OS X but seriously considering one of these just for the battery life and it-just-works portable computing.

Happy with the build quality.

Still MacBook is a better product for most use cases.

The 14.5 inch version is 1.6kg, 2TB, 2.9k resolution, also great design and build quality. $1700

https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/zenbook/zenbook-pr...

https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/zenbook/zenbook-pr...

I know this isn't your point but this is exactly why I don't use docker--but I'm a bit surprised to hear you mention `cargo build` as something that might fill up the disk. I've been a vocal critic of Rust on Hacker News in the past, but the one thing I always thought they did very, very well, was Cargo and the tight executables it produced for me.

Sacrificing some of the Blade aesthetics for better thermals with Asus laptops was a game changer for me.

Good question and probably worth an article or two. My thinking is that Apple is designing silicon that makes for great laptops (M4 in this case) and then building around that. You will be hard pressed to find an x86-64 chipset that does what the Apple chipset does, and without that no matter what laptop you build around it is not going to be competitive. Nimbler companies like Framework are working with more speculative silicon (like the AMD Ryzen AI Max) which people like Dell and Lenovo won't do (yet?) But even there you get closer but not really close to something like the compute complex in the Macbook Air.

https://system76.com/laptops

Dell XPS 13 isn't discontinued, its rebranding will be fully rolled out later this year

In the meantime Dell XPS 13s are currently available with 2TB and 64GB RAM (with a better screen than this Air I might add) and with a Snapdragon X Elite chip (which there are very few compatibility issues with in March 2025 even with gaming)

If its a 14 inch laptop you want XPS 14s are currently available with upto 4TB. They will also be rebranded later this year. They're on Intel chips and I'm hoping they will switch to Snapdragon on the rebrand to get the Apple like battery life

Why get the lesser copy, when I can get the original at better price?

Apple Retina screens are all 1000cd/m2.

For competitors, spending a huge amount of money in R&D to try to compete with Apple, will be most likely at a loss. At least until some chip manufacturer (read: Intel) doesn't step up their game.

As a consequence, competition has moved to the middle-low quality segment, one in which they can still compete because of 2 main factors: Apple is not interested in that segment and most companies won't move away from Windows (even if they probably should).

I guess a hurdle smartphones didn't have as they were breaking into a new market is compatibility; outside of the tech world, virtually all of corporate and personal environment is dependent on Windows and Windows-only software. Steam has shown it can work with SteamOS and Proton, making gaming on Linux a reality for a wide audience. What's missing is a major OEM to build a high-spec laptop with a custom Linux build to optimize performance and battery life, with a decent Windows compatibility layer and that would provide software companies an incentive to sell native Linux versions and support. Is Samsung really going to keep their laptop line depend on Windows, and leave it on the side-line as they will never be able to really optimize battery life and performance and compare to the MacBooks?

The performance/power gains come from the own ARM-chips and a OS/build system/framework fine tuned to make use of that

I know many people still love MacOS, but it lost me a few years ago. I've also, frankly, had much better milage out of Dell machines than Apple ones over the last ten years.

P1, P16s, T16, P14s

Most of which support:

- Up to 96 GB RAM

- 8 TB SSD (Dual slots)

- Upgradable memory and storage

- 4K OLED displays

- Excellent build quality

What more is needed?

There is a lot more to a good laptop than specs, and so far only Apple seems to really get that.

(Intel has to have some sketchy deals with manufacturers, otherwise why design a product like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon line only to put these Intel energy hogs in there?)

I am currently using a P16s with an Intel's meteor lake CPU and an RTX 500 Ada dGPU. I would say it is not that bad. Linux Mint worked OOB perfectly. I get 5-6 hrs of battery life which is fine for me (considering it has a 4K OLED display). The dGPU is mostly idle and the machine is mostly silent unless I am gaming.

The only times I hear the fans going are when using it on my lap or playing games. I do run Windows VM for a big .NET Framework project (coding on JetBrains Rider) and at the same time some coding on Linux. The CPU handles those fine.

These are my personal experiences though. The only issue I can pick is sometimes Chrome shows some artifacts (I think, related the iGPU driver)

Makes zero sense to get a P series when you could get a Macbook

In the US at least, they usually go on sale. If you can manage to get a corporate discount, you can get them at a sane price.

At December, for example, I got a latest P14s at around $1,100 which is OK price for the machine you get.

- Time your purchase

- get coupons

- get a corporate discount if you can

to get them at a sane price

People spent a decade upgrading laptops for a mere 5-10% increase in performance (sometimes less). I can't see someone giving up that much of a performance jump unless Windows is absolutely the only option.

> I want 2TB storage, a 4k (or close) HiDPI display, good build quality, and not a bulky gaming laptop. The XPS 15 was perfect, it had those specs

I believe all brands offer some laptops with hidpi screens.

The only part where Apple is unmatched is in battery life but you mention it is not a strong requirement.

Later I bought a new Malibal laptop, but mostly for the screen, usb-c ports and lower weight,but had to compromise on getting an unnecessary nVidia GPU that I just blacklist right away because the right laptop just didn't exist. I like the laptop, but I can't recommend Malibal laptops though, they are a weird company and getting things to work alright took way more effort than on my old XPS.

all these are likely cheaper per GB RAM and per TB SSD