I have a Clevo laptop (a few years old now) and even at the time, it was not exactly state of the art in terms of weight, battery life, etc. It's proven to be a fairly tough beast (even having fallen off my bike and lived). It is, unlike many new laptops, relatively easy to open up for upgrades and repair. Getting Apple's 'fit and finish' means a closed box.

When I was searching for a new laptop, I stumbled upon this comment from a System76 employee that goes into more depth about the work they do on new laptops that seems more than just relabelling Clevo laptops.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5umefi/system76_refr...

At the end, I went for a Lenovo V330 on sale since I couldn't justify the price of System76 plus shipping outside the US at the time.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with System76 in any way and have never owned a System76 laptop.

I'm thinking about using PopOS on my Thinkpad X1 Extreme, as it's rumoured to be the only Linux that supports hybrid graphics, and it's specifically designed for developers and other creators (which Macbook Pros once seemed to be).

Their hardware, though, seems to be meh. Give me this on some high quality hardware.

They are working towards it. Their new server hardware (or mini PC, forget which one) was designed and fabricated in-house.

It absolutely depends on which "Pros" your targeting. A software developer obviously has different needs in terms of software than a video editor or UI designer. I use Windows at work and at university. My private desktop has a dualboot install with Windows and popOS. Works perfectly fine for me

Yeah, that is still a problem. I couldn't really move completely away from the Mac until I got to a point where I didn't need InDesign anymore. There's no good Linux substitute, even for money. Sadly Adobe has hidden away FrameMaker, which started as a Unix program.