Apple is and always has been a hardware company. I would like to use the Linux ecosystem, however there’s simply no laptop other than Mac that is light and powerful and runs 15 hours in battery.
And besides, every time I see comments like this, all I can think is that they never have even tried to find a PC laptop that is small, fast and has good battery life. Believe it or not they exist.
Long running batteries would have been useful when I first was on safari in 2002. But last year I was on safari again, and at camp there was power and wifi in the tents. It actually kind of killed some of the romance.
For example, the ASUS TUF A14 is only one hour shorter on the real world office productivity test than the M5 MacBook Pro:
(Battery life section)
It also lasts longer than the M4 Pro MacBook Pro 14”.
Bonus points: it has replaceable, upgradable, DUAL full size SSD slots and replaceable WiFi card.
You’re also getting a better discrete graphics chip that you can use for higher performance applications, or go on still-good integrated graphics to get that great battery life.
Intel Panther Lake systems are rolling out and they have graphics performance slightly exceeding the M5 MacBook Pro along with excellent power efficiency.
Macs still win out on certain CPU benchmarks and certainly on creative benchmarks like video editing, but the truth of the matter is unless you’re making money editing videos, that doesn’t matter. It’s not like Apple chips are so far ahead that buying something else will make you sit in purgatory waiting for builds to complete.
I took the plunge recently and got off Mac. I was pleasantly surprised that, yes, other hardware is fine. Much of it is good, actually.
There are even PC laptops with haptic trackpads, but also, you really don’t need that. macOS has made itself require it by designing around it unnecessarily, presumably to sell more $150 external trackpads (e.g., a three finger swipe is really not easier to accomplish than a keyboard shortcut, it’s just overengineering).
Even if you can’t get the same battery life…that’s something a $50 external battery can solve, and I would suggest that anything above ~8 hours of battery is more of a nice to have than a necessity.
Is it 100% as good in every respect? No. But if you’d rather use Linux and the hardware is the only thing in your way, I’d start actually looking at other laptops to find one that works for you rather than assuming MacBooks as the best. (One of the challenges is that there are so many options once you leave Mac-land).
On this MacBook Pro review [1], yes, Macs are at the top of the list, but they aren’t wildly out front during high-intensity tasks.
MacBooks have been getting louder since the M1 generation, which is notable.
The M5 10 core is louder than the M4 Pro 14 core, which is louder than the M3 12 core in the same MacBook Pro chassis.
At the bottom of the benchmark you can see that a couple of Windows PCs aren’t that far off: both the ASUS TUF A14 and HP Omen Transcend 14, 5 and 3 dB higher, respectively.
The Omen Transcend 14 is a major cost savings over the MacBook Pro. If I configure it with 32GB of RAM, RTX5070, and 2TB storage, I’m at $1919.99. The same configuration for the MacBook Pro is $2599, but I’ve got no OLED screen and far worse graphics performance than the 5070.
If I want to spec it up to be match the graphics performance of the 5070 I’m probably at the M4 Max model and my grand total is at $3200-3700 depending on the choice of GPU core count.
[1] https://youtu.be/3Q837Uclwp8
6:19
I appreciate that price is a concern, but for me it's a secondary concern. Not that I am loaded or anything, with the Macbook I am confident I will be using the device for 5+ years. Being very sensitive to noise, I'd rather pay up than be upset for the next few years.