But if you don't need any of that, of course even a used windows laptop would do and can have 32GB RAM.
I paid 2200€ for the M2 Macbook Pro in Sweden, but PC hardware sales have been tanking hard, so I think the pricing reflects that.
Firstly, you can't add any more RAM to it. This turned out to be a BIG problem for me as I handle a lot of fairly huge RAW files in Adobe Lightroom.
Then there's the fact that it actually spends 95% of its time docked to my Studio Display and using the BT mouse and keyboard which fuck out all the time.
And the battery life isn't as great as people make it out to be. If I am on the road, which is basically never, then I'm lucky if I get 4 hours out of it.
So I thought sod it, why shouldn't I just have a proper desktop instead which solves all of these problems. I looked at the M2 studio, went pfffft at the price, and threw together a windows desktop. I've got hard wired keyboard, mouse, ethernet and headset and I can throw another TB in it or double the RAM to 64Gb for less than $100 each.
And Excel isn't a piece of shit on it.
At this point I don't agree that windows is inferior. It is just different. And quite frankly from a developer and productivity perspective it's actually a lot better.
I think it depends a lot of what you're developing.
For a lot of open source stuff, even OSX is a 2nd class citizen, and windows isn't even considered. Of course, you can do everything in a VM, but that can have its own problems.
If you live out of Visual Studio, though, I'm sure the experience is nice.
While it is true that windows is not considered, with WSL2, that doesn't matter anymore. Everything (99%) just works seamless with the Linux environment. And yes that's not truely native and technically a VM but I prefer WSL to a VM on macOS every day of the week. Ironically, if I would need to switch to Linux, I'd buy a Macbook.
Define “huge”.
I edit 45 megapixel RAW files on a m2 MacBook Air all the time and the only way that makes any sense is if you cheaped out and bought the base model. 16 GB of ram is still plenty for Lightroom and 32 GB is more than enough. The battery life is also amazing unless I’m dumb enough to do something like generate 1:1 previews for thousands of photos all at once. Yeah, you can’t upgrade it later but that’s why you need to make sure to buy enough hardware when you’re getting it in the first place.