It's not even close to a competition. Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them.
Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. The trackpads are downright unusable. The keyboards are a hit or a miss. And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.
Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway.
Increasingly feels like most manufacturers have given up on the laptop as an innovation center and are happy to just scrape up the consumers who can't or won't buy Apple.
I picked my daughter up an m1 macbook air about a year ago. It was an absolute delight of a machine to use. Light weight, no fans, no hot bits during general usage, long battery life, a screen that didn't upset my eyes, and importantly the OS just got out of the way during general usage.
I wound up buying myself an m1 air about 6 months later.
My only gripe is that I wish it had more RAM, but even then the unified memory approach has made my expected ram usage vs actual ram usage a bit of an odd thing. It consistently uses less ram than I'd normally anticipate. That said, more ram by default would help fill in those times when I do load it up.
It also has imo better ports and a track point.
The problem is that Windows sucks more and more with every iteration and there is nothing Lenovo or other manufacturers can do about it. Lenovo also keeps shipping hot and loud Intel CPUs which hurt reputation of the ThinkPad line and may confuse new buyers. Still if you know what to choose you will get more for your money with P14 than Macbook air imo.
They are awesome, but not perfect.
Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS. Any one of these could be reason enough for people to look elsewhere.
The plateau of 6 hours is less Microsoft's fault here and more a combination of stinginess by OEMs and their willingness to reduce cost by taking money to have extra installed software out of the gate.
> The trackpads are downright unusable.
This varies wildly by OEM and price point. Below some weird gulf, this is the truth. Above some arbitrary shore, there is a plateau of goodness, of which some rival the historic best from macs.
> The keyboards are a hit or a miss.
Again this comes down to the choices made by the OEM during their costing. I recently picked up a Chromebook from Acer just to have something that was not "very Computer" when I found myself needing An Computer to look something up with. It had surprisingly little flex to the chassis, and I found myself quite enjoying the deck, minus...
well
> And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.
Or 1366x768, the Devil's Resolution. The reasons for this are weird and varied but the short form is that economies of scale have yet to make it more profitable for companies to standardize on higher density panels. It actually makes me insanely mad that the laptop I started college with (a dell c600 hand-me-down I'd been tinkering with since high school) had a better resolution at 1400x1050 and that the 2560x1600 beast that I carried after that... that in 2012 would define the lower side of "retina".
It is disturbing it didn't sink the Macbooks. It speaks volumes of how little people care about their own data. About their own privacy. There should've been zero sold. It truly is dismal and a very large systemic problem a laptop like this is sold.
Because when it breaks, are you going to wipe it and restore from backup? No. You will just hand it over to a repair person and even an ethical shop much less Apple doesn't even have a chance to hand the disk back before handling it. An unknown amount of complete strangers will access your everything. Your medical records, your banking, your private photos, everything.
And people pay real world money for this, money they worked hard for. It's unfathomable to me.
The opposite ("macs are overpriced") is something I've never been able to understand. Back in 2013 when I bought my current laptop, the mac book air was the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life, nicest keyboard, and a bunch of superlatives I don't remember, and it was somewhat over £1000. The closest non-mac "ultrabooks" I could find in shops at the time cost the same, and felt like cheap rubbish. And this laptop just refuses to die, and handles my workload just fine after all these years. I'm dreading the day I have to replace it.
To your point, then comes the lower end ("just give me something cheap"), the corporate middle ("the same laptop as at work"), and the super high end (gaming, CAD, anything needing special software or a discrete GPU), with the outliers (linux etc)
IMHO windows laptop nowadays are for people who either don't really care, or have already a very specific target or limitation.
For instance Lenovo or Asus definitely care about pushing laptops' limits and design. A lot. IMHO more than Apple.
[0] resistance to abuse isn't there. A macbook's screen will be dead pretty quick if not handled with appropriate care. A Lenovo Flex for instance will take it a lot longer.
It is not correct, unless you select minimal amount of ram and SSD. Select versions with proper amount of memory and MacBook becomes much more expensive than comparable windows machine.
I am in the group of people who go for Full HD. It's enough for me, my eyesight is relatively bad. Then again, I use 3 monitors.
Until you want more memory or a larger SSD then the Macbook is all of a sudden double the price of the equivalent PC laptop.
>Increasingly feels like most manufacturers have given up on the laptop as an innovation center and are happy to just scrape up the consumers who can't or won't buy Apple.
That's basically true, but with Apple becoming more and more expensive that does leave a very large low-end market for them to play in.
Plus, on my laptop I just simply upgraded the RAM with another 16GB of RAM which will give me some breathing room for at least another year.
For me, a windows computer "just works". Everything I connect I know will work as expected. Not looking forward to learn some new quirks. Even the top left action buttons just irk me to death.
I have a MacBook Pro M1, which is pure fluid bliss. It cost less, it's faster, and the battery lasts for days.
I've been positively delighted by my two Intel Alder Lake laptops I use during travel for play (ASUS Vivobook S 14X OLED, 12700H CPU) and work (Lenovo V14 G3, 1255U CPU) respectively. I can get 4 to 8 hours off of them depending on use with the charge limited to 80% for longer overall life, and as I just mentioned the hardware are quite powerful in their own right.
>The trackpads are downright unusable.
Both of my laptops I just mentioned have wonderful touchpads. Frankly though, this absolutely will vary by several country miles depending on manufacturer and even model. I suppose I got lucky here.
>And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.
I'm gonna be honest: I fucking hate screens bigger than 1920x1080 (or x1200 for 16:10 screen ratios). My laptop for play has a 2880x1800 screen, but I've got it rendering at 1920x1200 because so many programs just assume pixel densities around that area and either can't or won't handle scaling.
I also have to still do some scaling up even at 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 at laptop screen sizes anyway because everything is so small, but it's still less compatibility headaches compared to physically denser pixels.
