The low-end Macbooks are designed to be in a student's backpack and fit comfortably on a lecture hall desk. Apple has beaten the x86 competition to death in the student market by prioritizing portability and durability over winning gaming benchmarks. Some campus surveys show Apple having as high as a 50% market share with the students. Also, Apple is now the #1 laptop company globally:
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Well that explains the price point they target, since most students just immediately take out giant loans and worry about it later. Or if they worry about it now, the cost of everything else probably makes the Macbook the least of their worries.
I hadn't really considered the student market when I talked about plugging it into the monitor. But that's on me for not making my context explicit. I was considering the professional world and there I would imagine most productive people would prefer a 15" one. I personally would struggle to do serious work on a single 13" screen day in day out. Plugging it into a monitor would be basic, and I think that's true of most.
Regards the pie chart, I'm not a fanboy of any company so it doesn't matter to me whether or not Apple is the largest single laptop company now nor do I take popularity as a proxy for quality (too many exceptions to that rule). But as you post it, I'll say I don't really think it's apples to apples. They might have 17% but Apple are the only company that makes Apple computers. The other 83% is going to be overwhelmingly x86 with some growing ARM share. And I don't imagine Microsoft cares that much they're only "4%" of hardware when they created the Surface line mainly to push the Windows market to have a reference and higher base line. In any case, as said - I'm only really interested in actual value, not "my team".
Dell & HP are more popular in the US thanks to landing most of the juicy corporate contracts.
I generally like Dell as their consumer machines are also good. Whereas every HP thing I've had in the consumer space, I damn near had to format and reinstall to get anything close to a clean version of Windows.
18% faster, 60% more power consumption:
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60 > 18 isn't really a comparison when the numbers are counting things of different value. I will absolutely take 18% more performance in exchange for increasing my annual running cost by $2.01. My time is worth more than $2.01/(8h*5d*52w). That only becomes a bad bargain if the increased power consumption actually hinders my use and that's my main point - that 11 hours is plenty for me. It's as long as I'd want to use it between any points I travel and most every mode of travel where I could simultaneously work I could simultaneously charge. Battery life was once a critical determining factor in the viability of a laptop. Now it's more akin to someone with a 5090 playing on a 1080p monitor. Some people might have a big 120Hz 4K screen and want graphics settings cranked up higher than they can tell the difference. But for most people, it's simply not worth paying a premium for when you've already hit 'good enough'.
All that said, I'm actually considering buying one of the Lenovo Yogas because the form factor is desirable to me and I might get the Intel version on the strength that it has USB4. Additional battery life is still a nice to have, I'm not dismissing it. It's just become something way over-focused on by reviewers and vendors, imo.
So you haven't changed anything you're keeping it plugged in all the time at a desk?
No. I'm just saying that any time that I do spend at a desk it's inherently charging up. I think someone made a comment about finding the laptop was drained in the morning. I was querying how that managed to come about between fast charging and any prolonged period of working on it being somewhere you could keep it on charge conveniently. The fact newer laptops can charge from the monitor cable was an example of how convenient and normal it is to always be charging when using it.
When you pair long life and fast charging you can invert the entire concept. Use it anywhere, leave it anywhere, charge every now and then, same thing you do with a phone. You don't need to consider making sure things are charged, it lasts long enough with 30%. And even with 15h of life I'd love to see 20 or 25. I don't need faster computers I need more usable ones with nicer inputs and output.
Okay, well more is always nice, but nothing is free and I don't care to pay for things I don't need. Maybe you're an outlier but you say even with 15hrs (and I mean real, not advertised), you'd love to see 20 or 25 - my question would be when was the last time you went 15hrs of use without it being
convenient to charge it? I emphasise the convenient because I'm not trying to dismiss anything but absolute technicalities. I mean like 15hrs of use where it would have been actual hassle.
Honestly, the only scenario I can think of where this would actually be significant is one in which I've forgotten my charger. Even there, I could get a dirt cheap USB charger in any all night garage or hotel or grab one off someone else.
Again, I'm not saying it isn't a nice to have. But people have got to stop acting like it's something that is a major differentiator anymore. For most of us, it simply isn't.
I think you're 100% right about the out of the box experience on macos, but the lines seriously begin to blur when you start adding additional tools. Tools like Raycast can fix so many of the issues I had with Macos instantly, with minimal configuration, with no bugs. On Windows there are alot of tools to assist with your workflow, but I find that none of them really work well together. They require alot of additional configuration, and once implemented the experience feels clunkier. The superior virtual desktop/workspace experience is also a big part of the issue imo. I use virtual desktops constantly in MacOS and Linux, and find the Windows implementation to be alot slower, with awful keybinds as well. I find it pretty difficult to work on Windows with less than 3 monitors, but feel totally fine with 2 on other platforms.
When I was using a Mac I was told that "Rectangles" would solve my issues. It did not. I wont dismiss Raycast on the basis of that past experience. I'll take your word for it that it makes a big difference, I'm not familiar with it. I will say that there are a lot of nice features in Windows - even 11 - for window management and I find it fine myself. I tend to use Docker a lot more these days and I don't really need virtual desktops. Everything is just remote connections which can be quite seamless in VS Code or Windows Terminal. When I do have a full virtual machine it's almost always Linux for me and I'm just using WSL2. I'm making a bit of a guess but you're perhaps using Hyper-V? If so I would agree on that not being perfect fun to use with DEs, but then nearly everything I do remotely (even local "remote") doesn't need DEs. So different scenarios.
