Meanwhile a lenovo is 800 EUR for a 11th gen i5, 16GB RAM and a 3050ti.
As someone with a value investing mindset, I personally can't find the extra value for double the money in macs.
That's more the OS scheduling and userspace software than actual hardware. I don't experience any lag even on my father's 10yr old laptop.
If a laptop makes an employee 1% more efficient, that has returns of $2k/year to the employer for an employee whose cost is $200k/year. Note that cost >> salary, so this corresponds to perhaps a $100k salary.
Reliability is king. A failed device will typically cost thousands of dollars in lost productivity, IT costs, etc. A device which fails at a critical moment can have almost arbitrary costs.
From a business perspective, Apple, Latitude / Precision / XPS, and Thinkpads are usually the only devices which make sense.
From a home perspective, there are plenty of $200 machines which get the job done. That's one of Apple's problems.
Another one is that most businesses spent a lot on upgrades during COVID, and those machines are still within their lifecycle. As we're entering a predicted recession, delaying upgrades is the #1 thing to go. Layoffs also mean there's a glut of machines (there's a ton of nice off-lease stuff on refurbished web sites right now at bottom-barrel prices; I saw a Precision laptop with 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Xeon, and NVidia Tesla for under $500 a few weeks back).
The price is still stupid, but a potential customer not needing to give a crap about his new computer might just make the steep price worth it.
But I think they were also talking about the overall convenience-quality tradeoff.
Although I’d probably just buy a 3 year old Air for 800euro rather than buy a new one at that price point.
For durability, I would expect that old Air to last longer than a brand new Lenovo.
I'm sure the resale value is much, much higher. I purchased my very first iPhone, an iPhone 13 pro, largely due to the fact that it will still be worth a significant amount after 2 or 3 years.
If you take that into account, the difference probably isn't as noticeable.
I mean, you can get a light and thin Surface laptop. But it’s in the same price range as Macs. But M2 definitely beats Intel on battery life.