I've used a lot of laptops over the last 30 years going back through generations of ThinkPads running Linux and Windows, some HP boxes, PowerBook Duo and G4, and probably some I've forgotten. I now have a "midnight" M2 MacBook Air, 512Gb flash and 16Gb RAM, and it is, hands-down, the best laptop I've ever had. It's far faster than my 8-core Mac Pro. I run VS Code, OpenOffice, tons of tabs in Firefox, and terminals. I can even run Stable Diffusion on it using the "Diffusion Bee" packaged version. I think your bias about expensive and "faster... for less money" is out of date. Some of us appreciate things like length of time we can use it before having to recharge, and this thing leaves other devices far behind.