Most laptops sit on a desk and never see a lap, even Macs.

Benchmarking how long people could sit with a laptop on their lap while running Geekbench could be an interesting metric though.

I can't even remember PCs now (been 10+ years on Macs) but heat is still an issue (especially in summer in hot climates) if the thing is going to throttle.

I've got a laptop of the times when you switched to a Mac. It's warm in winter, which is nice, but not so warm to be a problem in summer. My workloads are mild, Django and Rails. Even the test suites are not CPU bound. Linux, not Windows.

Heat is an issue with Macs too: if it wasn't, you'd have Air chassis with the performance of M4 Max/Ultra.

Yes, they've done some nice things to get the performance and energy efficiency up, but it's not like they've got some magic bullet either. From what I've seen in reviews, Intel is not so far off with things like Ultra 7 258V. If they caught up to TSCM on the process node, they would probably match Apple too.

And yet, it allows the user to experience true freedom unlike Apple's offerings.

Care to elaborate on this? I get that iOS is a closed system but I’ve never felt limited by Apple in what I can do with my Macbook.

There is no decent option on an alternative operating system. I do not like macOS and its many quirks, especially its extremely gatekept nature, including the system being SURE that what IT wants is the best for me; I understand that this might be an approach that some people prefer, but in my case it's the equivalent of showing a bull a red cloth.

I will say this - and most will not like this - that I'd go out and buy a M* MacBook if they still kept Boot Camp around and let me install Windows 11 ARM on it. I've heard Linux is pretty OK nowadays, but I have some... ideological differences with the staff behind Asahi and it is still a wonky hack that Apple can put their foot down on any day.

Why not virtualise (?) with Parallels? Runs like a beast (M1 mba).

Because I'd prefer to run bare metal and, if I recall correctly, macOS still hogs up 50+ GB on a clean install - and there is no GPU acceleration(? - might be wrong here).

I guess the hardware is extremely locked down. That part is a drag. Application sharing limitations (needing to publish to the app store, more or less) still feels wrong after all these years. There's more but those are the ones that bother me with any frequency

Need to publish to the app store? I have precisely zero app store applications installed. All just downloaded DMGs from the vendor’s website.

It's an old desktop built in 2014 or 2015 that I never used on my lap.

This was a reply to "never having had a computer that felt fast for so long".

For some tasks, this CPU with the GTX 970 still feels faster than MacBook M2 or recent Ryzen laptop APU.