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Comment by xNeil | Hacker News Reader

You're talking about best laptops. Parent said physically best. I don't think the answer is subjective - Apple most definitely makes far better laptops physically.

The M2 Air is astonishingly light, while being made of metal, as opposed to the ThinkPad's (cheap imo, but subject to debate) plastic. Don't see what the argument is.

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It depends on your definition of "physically best". Which is better, a Ferrari Daytona or a Ford F-150? Macs are sleek and elegant, but they're built with absolutely no regard for long-term serviceability. Thinkpads are big ugly slabs of black plastic, but they're easy to open, they have a sensible internal layout and Lenovo provide service manuals and spare parts.

Thinkpads (say X1 Carbon) are physically better. Thin doesn't appeal to me, it's disadvantage. Ergonomy is better too. Just CPUs are worse.

That ThinkPad plastic is basically unscratchable. It's not the same plastic as lollipop sticks.

Thinkpads basically look the same for 10+ years.

It would be more clear-cut for me if Apple used their engineering prowess to expose an M.2 slot or make it easier to fix a display without buying a $600 topcase assembly. The physical build of their products is fragile at best and consumer-hostile at worst, in my opinion.

My experience with airs is if you try to compile anything with them, the CPU cores peg, the fans go crazy, cpu throttles. (This was with an intel-based air.)

My point isn't that Airs are bad, but that they're not ideal for some tasks and saying any machine is "the best" without mentioning what you're using it for is less useful of a statement than you might think it is.

The Apple Silicon Mac Book Airs are a totally different beast. The Intel ones were unbearably slow for heavy computing tasks. The new architecture is really fast and doesn’t get very hot while being really fast.

Re-read my comment. It's not about the ARM macs. It's about the intel macs.

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