https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/th...
https://www.amazon.com/Dell-XPS-Business-Laptop-Processor/dp...
If you want notebooks with 128 GB memory, you want to look at the highest-end workstations.
Dell Precision 7680 and 7780 (comes with new CAMM memory form factor)
HP ZBook Fury 16 G10
Both of these have options for up to 128 GB (ECC) memory.
Horrific.
I don't know what that measurement means. Neither the Precision nor the ZBook are plastic; they have metal chassis. That's how magnesium, aluminium, and titanium look like without anodising them with fancy colours like Apple does.
These notebooks are also thicker and heavier than usual because they have to dissipate something like 250 W of heat. Good on Apple for designing such power-efficient SoCs; many high-end Windows notebooks have to make do with Intel CPUs and NVIDIA cards that will perform better than that MacBook Pro, but unfortunately also draw about twice as much power.
Finally, these are business workstations, not fashion statements. People—or rather, companies—buy them to get work done on them, not show them off in Starbucks. They are meant to be serviced easily and quickly, and come with up to 5 years of next-business-day onsite support with 24/7 telephone service.
Both the ZBook and the Precisions have 4 DDR5 slots, 3-4 NVMe SSD slots and a WWAN NVMe slot, a replaceable (though possibly not upgradeable) GPU card, an easily-replaceable display assembly and battery, and a productive keyboard with a keypad, and a reasonably large and accurate trackpad with buttons. They have Ethernet ports, USB-A ports, and can support up to five high-resolution displays.
These workstation product lines have also come with service manuals for the past two decades. Apple released service manuals for its own products this year, after significant regulatory and consumer pressure.
The MacBook has its advantages, and I fully understand why someone might buy one. But your argument is in extremely bad faith—it 'looks ugly', but you haven't seen it in person. Having actually used these machines for 5+ years, I can tell you they are pretty damn solid.
I daresay these don't even look that different to Framework's notebooks, which are the apple (pun not intended) of HN readers' eyes.
There is some threshold of computational demand and cost past which the specs dominate other factors, but before that I personally consider friction in various circumstances to be a higher priority.
Plus, any company worth its salt that deploy these notebooks would re-image them anyway.
You’re thinking about it the wrong way.
The more RAM you have, the faster + smoother your experience using an application will be, and this will be much more noticeable if you usually run multiple applications at the same time, like virtually everyone in the world do.
This is especially true now that we have options to run local-only AI models. The next couple of years will be interesting.
Your point about local AI is pretty interesting. It does seem highly likely that computers with limited memory could "age" faster than they have done in the past ten years, with the advent of more AI workloads.
This is the mentality that MSI targets with the $1300 AORUS Z790 Xtreme X motherboard. More is clearly better, right? Nope. Not at all. In this case, there is an amount of RAM an app will consume and you have that much, the rest will not do much. Even buffering/caching only can consume so much. It's very hard to fill even 64GB in a laptop but 128GB is near impossible.
[1] https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_P...
Why not?
Personally I've been tempted by the hardware, but I don't care for Apple's software bundle (MacOS, iTunes, etc.). With the M-series they have show indifference/reluctance/hostility to work with other vendors and the open source community. Asahi Linux has made major progress, but despite support from Apple.
Another (minor) frustration is the keyboard layout. I'm user to having backspace, delete, insert.
Finally, Apple's offerings are a bit heavier that the ~1kg ultrabook I like to work with.
[Summary] I wouldn't say I would never buy Apple, but so far they haven't presented products appealing to me. And at the root that is caused by their approach to stewarding their "ecosystem".
As a disclaimer I do think Linux with Gnome provides the absolute best developer experience so you can take all my opinions with that in hand.
You get used to this in three days.
Is cmd somewhere else on UK Apple keyboards, than on US ones?
If it's like the US ones, I spent my first 25ish computing years on Windows and Linux (and Sun, et c.—point is, not Mac) but after getting used to Mac's shortcuts, I gotta hand it to them: what they've done is more correct than what everyone else is doing. Ctrl-shortcuts involve more stretching and wrist movement, so, are slower and push one closer to RSI, and putting more common shortcuts on cmd than ctrl leads to fewer collisions (no awkwardness in the terminal, for example).
I don't trust the software either.