> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives, and about $600-$700 for a machine with a discrete GPU.

People love to say this without linking to a model. That's because the models in this price range are obviously not in the same weight class as a MacBook.

Edit: Weight class and weight-of-laptop are not the same thing. I don't know how to explain the idiom "weight class" so that the more... literal-minded Hacker News commenters will understand what I mean, but let's start there.

Oh yeah?

Please link to a model, just one in the 500-600 range that is comparable to a 1K Apple model.

I have owned half a dozen Windows laptops in the past, in all kinds of price ranges, cheaper and far more expensive than a Macbook Air.

None were even remotely comparable to the build quality and practicality of a Macbook Air. This was true even in the Intel CPU era. In the M processor era, the gap only increased.

You cannot even do research on a good Windows laptop because the makers constantly change the model numbers to confuse the customer and hide the flaws of these systems.

You buy a Windows laptop then either the screen, the battery life, the touchpad or the keyboard will suck ... maybe all four.

The sole reason to buy a Windows laptop and put up with all these flaws is playing games. If you need that you will put up with all that crap.

As someone who likes to keep at least one machine dedicated to each major OS around at any given time, the thing that’s frustrating about non-Apple laptops is that just about all of them, including machines costing well in excess of base Macbook models, make big tradeoffs somewhere or another. Very few are good all-rounders, even if many are better than Macbooks in one or two aspects.

I would kill for a version of ThinkPad X1 Nano or X1 Carbon for example that had the battery life, silence, and unplugged performance of a Macbook Air for example, but no such machine exists even if I were to spend twice as much as the cost of a MacBook Air.

> The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market is that there is a mind-boggling number of confusing models, SKUs, processor/gpu variants, etc., and wildly variable physical quality control that confuse consumers and leave them unhappy. This is the flip side of choice in prioritizing, say, gaming performance over battery life while optimizing price or vice-versa.

This is 100% it, Lenovo has been killing it lately with their Yoga/Slim series, but for every laptop they have that competes with a MacBook, they also have a myriad of other options that are just e-waste. At the end of the day, the average consumer is not going to do the same kind of research that a tech enthusiast might do, and Apple has a somewhat simple catalog (although incredibly overpriced once you step out of the entry configs).

I bought a laptop for about $600 with a GPU (RTX 3050).

The display... is not comparable. Sure, it's 144hz compared to the Mac's 60hz... but it's only 74% NTSC at 250 nits with 1080p, so the color accuracy and dim picture is distractingly bad.

And as for sleep, it's just useless. You close it with 70% at night and it's dead by morning. Supposedly the battery is the same size, but even when it's awake, the battery never makes it last more than ~2 hours. Also, that's two hours... when I'm not gaming, as I painfully learned when trying to download a Windows ISO. When I'm gaming, well, then it's shorter.

I might as well mention the thick, heavy, completely plastic construction. Feels like it will shatter from one drop. On the upside I managed to upgrade it from 8GB to 16GB... but then I'm wondering why this laptop even shipped with 8GB in the first place.

Ultimately though, it runs Windows with a basic GPU. Desktop Parametric CAD isn't coming to Mac anytime soon.

I disagree with your assessment.

Things that matter to me and that all Windows laptops in the same price range or lower as the MBA have shittier speakers, camera, monitor (both brightness and color accuracy). The trackpad feels entirely wrong on those plastic devices and often you have loud fans turning on at random times. Furthermore they're usually heavier despite being made out of plastic rather than metal.

> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives

I would pay more for an acceptable alternative - no fan, Windows 11, good battery life, top quality screen, no gimmick features (touchscreen! detachable screen! whatever).

No such thing exists, as far as I can tell.

> The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market

Another way to look at that is "MacOS vs non-MacOS" laptop market.

There is only one manufacturer of MacOS laptops. That helps keeping the number of models down. Same thing for the iOS vs non-iOS phone and tablets market. If you want MacOS or iOS you must buy Apple. Hackintoshes do exist but are a rounding error compared to the number of machines Apple sells. And if you want Apple, you must get MacOS and iOS. You can run something else on that hardware, but again we are writing about rounding errors.

There are non-MacOS laptop manufacturers with even less models than Apple have. Maybe it's very niche but the Framework laptop has been popular on HN lately and it has only two models.

On the other side if you want to buy non-MacOS, then HP, Lenovo or Dell have a zillion of laptops each, ranging from the very low end to the very high end. Some people pick features and look at which models are left with those features (that's me.) Some people pick a price tag instead. Probably the laptop is a commodity to the price tag people, much like gas. Who really cares about the gas company? If you need to fill the tank everything will do.

And about

> the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep

this is something that Microsoft throw at us and we can't dodge it much. My laptop runs Linux and it's from the pre Hybrid Sleep era. I didn't investigate if Linux sleep works well with new laptops.

Hybrid sleep being broken is the #1 dealbreaker issue I have with my work-supplied XPS 9570. I know that machine is pretty long in the tooth at this point, but in some ways that actually makes it worse, that it's been all these years and Dell just shrugged and moved on.

It really doesn't make me want to reward them with more money, only to find out what exciting new issues will be present and trivially reproducible for the entire next revision of the hardware.

I buy myself supposedly overpriced Macs and never have hardware issues, but buy family, that prefer Windows, more affordable $400-800 HP/Toshiba laptops. Over the last decade and a half, the HPs/Toshibas invariably have keyboard failures within a year or two, with ignored keypresses and key labels rubbing off, and internal fans seized, overheating problems. And those cheap plastic cases are never the same once opened. I hate them so much. Although, I suspect if I spent as much on a PC that I do on a Mac, we wouldn't have those issues, but I can't bring myself to spend that much on a Windows laptop.

> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives,

I don't think this true, unless you have extremely low standards for "acceptable". I've tried a number of $400 laptops and in every single case got fed up with the shittiness within minutes.

> Also my personal opinion is that 90% of consumer frustration comes from the extremely subpar implementation of Hybrid Sleep between Windows, Intel/AMD, and OEMs. Consumers expect to be able to close their laptop and for it to preserve battery instead of becoming hot or dying the bag. That really needs a solution.

Mind boggling that so many smart people at Microsoft/AMD/Intel/HP/Dell have not been able to figure this out yet.

At $700, you'll out-spec the mac on RAM and GPU but get a potato grade 1080p display.

My Asus zenbook 14 is around that price, has a 1TB disk, and 16GB of ram. I'm sure the processor on the M3 is faster, and probably a fair amount more battery out of it, but now I'm comparing a $1000 zenbook to a $1700 13' macbook once I add disk and memory, without the upgraded cpu.

of note: MacBook Air actually has a decent GPU...

I have yet to see a under $1.5k non-Apple laptop with a comparable high res / high quality display.

>But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives

Can you show me just one of those, please?

I would buy it today.

About a year and a half ago, I was looking to get a new MBPro to replace my existing one. I loved the hardware, but having used Linux since the alphabet floppies, the software was always meh. So I was in Costco one day and they had cheap Lenovo ideapads (Ideapad 5 Pro 14") on sale for something like $700US. I bought one, put Pop_OS! on it and it's been running great since. Has and AMD processor, 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. It's really snappy and best of all it's pretty solid with no deck flex.

Sorry but 400 is peanuts to beat Apple’s simplest in build quality, touchpad and performance