There are excellent laptops that aren't made by Apple. I feel that Apple's advantage there was lost at least a couple years ago.

At the top of that list I would probably put the Dell XPS 13 , and it can be bought with Linux. HP (Envy/Spectre) and Lenovo (x1 carbon) have laptops that look to be very high quality, but I don't have personal experience with them and they don't ship Linux.