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That’s because battery life was pretty mediocre across the board, with Apple occasionally squeaking out a bit of an upper hand on the Air. Most laptops were in the same boat, aside from gaming and workstation laptops but battery life has never been the point of those.
That changed dramatically with the M-series Macs. People didn’t start caring because Apple did, but because it meant no longer being tethered to a wall, being able to do a lot of outings without a brick or charger cable at all, and on extended trips being able to get by with a little phone charger instead of a the usual huge ungainly brick.
One of the primary objectives of a laptop is portability, and long battery life is an objective upgrade in that category. Not everybody needs it but for those who do it’s difficult to give up once you’ve had it.
EDIT: Another advantage of that higher efficiency is that MacBooks can run at full performance without being plugged in without it obliterating battery life. x86 laptops universally throttle when untethered and while this can be disabled, they burn through their batteries much more quickly.
For someone who is actually out and about all the time, this is life changing.
If you just sit with your laptop tethered at your desk all day, they why would you ever care?
I think most people who are so wowed by Macs bought just a garbage Windows Machine (e.g. almost everything from Asus and Acer) before and then splurged the money for a nice one, so obviously it's so much better in comparison.
The smaller 13” Air also gets similar numbers despite its smaller battery, which is a big deal for people who don’t want to lug around a 15/16” laptop.
On the other hand, every Mac I've used over the past 15 years has been bulletproof. It turns on, it works, it runs *nix. It's an invisible interface to getting work done.
Use Fedora. Its up to date.
Note that Fedora is NOT Arch.
And all you needed to do was know Fedora is SOTA. Once you know that, you don't need to change.
I haven't packed a charger for the day for 3 years. I can work in coffee shops or on the couch for over 6 hours without even thinking about charging. I'm sorry but if you haven't tried the M* macbooks you don't know what you're criticising.
And MacBooks also have a better display and build quality. Like, touchpad is still hit or miss on any non-Apple device.
The screen is seriously ‘meh’, a massive upgrade from the previous HP model’s “you paid how much for this?”
Both have plastic cases that are fine but don’t feel tight/solid.
The keyboards are 80% and off center so there’s a numpad, which makes things hard to type for me.
The trackpads are fine. Which is way better than I was expecting.
Neither held a candle in speed or quality to my 16 GB M1 Air, and they are developer laptops, not $600 models.
I’m pretty sure I’d want a Neo over a $600 PC for non-developer work.
And the noise. Spin the fan up. Now down. Now up. Now down. Random spinning HD noises too (2nd disk I don’t use). Just to sit on the desktop.
- Great battery life
- Solid build quality
- A familiar interface (iPhone is the most popular OS in the US)
- Good enough speed and snappiness for the tasks they can't do on their phone
- Can walk into Costco or buy online at Amazon without having to hunt for deals or refurbs
- Is from a brand they are familiar with and has an association with quality.
- Is somewhere around $500-$800, the most common price range for laptops today
The MacBook Neo ticks all those boxes, and it comes in fun colors. It's the one you can walk into a store, buy, not really sweat the speeds and feeds and know you will have a pretty great experience with. I'm not sure why so many people are having a hard time understanding this.
I'm right now in the Market for a new Laptop, because I need way more GPU Power than my T470 provides, and to be honest the MacBookPros are quite competitively priced compared to the P-ThinkPads with Nvidia Cards. (Both around 3000€) They also finally offer a matte screen option
The only thing holding me back right now is the soldered SSD, RAM (and shitty Linux support).
It was quite nice being able to upgrade RAM, SSD and replace the Battery on it. Otherwise it wouldn't have lasted for 9 years
That laptop won't have half the battery life the macbook does. It really all only boils down to the "handiness" of the device.