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Exactly the real issue and better question.

If you are running Windows based software on Windows, which is the bulk of all office and school software, then the devices really should be excluded. Comparing hardware specs is nonsense when the program won't run on the hardware.

If you are comparing web applications which are increasingly common, then it is more about how each platform provides better browsers. Does this Apple laptop have better web browser performance than this Windows laptop browser or that table's browser performance. It all goes back to the Internet browser experience in that review.

What is the reviewer actually reviewing? An Apple to Apple review is great. (hehe) A Windows to Windows review is great. An Apple to Windows to Android to Chromium review is inherently limited usefulness.

Thatâ(TM)s funny, I run productivity apps on my M1 Mac. Including native Apple Silicon builds of MS office. What work/school apps arenâ(TM)t available as native?

Apparently the app that prevents you from posting Unicode to Slashdot.

Disable the "use smart quotes" or "convert to smart quotes" in input/keyboard settings.

If you are running Windows based software on Windows, which is the bulk of all office and school software

If you are running Windows based software on Windows, which is the bulk of all office and school software

I don't think that's valid anymore for productivity. Macs don't just have equivalent apps - they have mostly the same apps. MS Office, Zoom, Chrome/Firefox, Adobe Acrobat/Reader, Evernote, Slack, etc. But especially for school, since a lot of the entrenched software supported Macs before Wintel took over in education. And really, a lot of education is moving over to Chromebooks for price reasons.

Wanting to be cross platform is why we have so many crap UIs these days. Glorified web apps, or actual web apps, or awful cross platform UI toolkits. Eclipse is a great example, although that's far from its biggest flaws.

It's not impossible. Visual Studio Code is cross platform and doesn't suck.

I think one reason is "material design" from google, and the other reason are mindless developers who do not think about the UI, departments that have no UI designers, and/or incompetent UI designers.

Having a good functional UI is possible on any platform, including web.

Depending on what you're doing, you can run into various things that won't run on Mac. This is especially true in engineering, architecture, chemistry, and other hard scientific/industrial fields.

Having worked in health care for the last 6 years, both for a lab/testing company and a major hospital company, I can say that it would be virtually impossible for 90% of our employees to do anything productive on a Mac. Most of our vendors, especially for instrumentation, would outright refuse to support it. And t

"Reviewers at ostensibly neutral publications are afraid that reiterating the plain truth about x86 vs. Apple silicon — that Apple silicon wins handily in both performance and efficiency — is not going to be popular with a large segment of their audience. Apple silicon is a profoundly inconvenient truth for many computer enthusiasts who do not like Macs, so they've gone into denial..."

"Reviewers at ostensibly neutral publications are afraid that reiterating the plain truth about x86 vs. Apple silicon — that Apple silicon wins handily in both performance and efficiency — is not going to be popular with a large segment of their audience. Apple silicon is a profoundly inconvenient truth for many computer enthusiasts who do not like Macs, so they've gone into denial..."

This is going to be a calm, factual and unemotional discussion.

Therein lies the rub. So long as the Apple laptop can run the same software as the Windows laptop without making any sacrifices, the comparison is easy.

If it can't then it's not so easy anymore.

Right, because Windows and Office are industrial standards. Office is./p>

Right, because Windows and Office are industrial standards.

Right, because Windows and Office are industrial standards.

And Office runs on the Mac, and has for decades....

I'm pretty much in the same boat. Even though I am quite comfortable using Ubuntu as my daily driver at home, the reliance of my company on applications that are more Windows/MSFT centric makes that the "easy button" to press for a work system. I don't really care if there's a small efficiency, cost, or performance gain to be had by forcing a square peg through a round hole. A lot of enterprises don't even pretend to be friendly to Mac users so many people simply don't have a choice at the end of the day

Therein lies the rub. So long as the Apple laptop can run the same software as the Windows laptop without making any sacrifices, the comparison is easy.

Therein lies the rub. So long as the Apple laptop can run the same software as the Windows laptop without making any sacrifices, the comparison is easy.

Therein lies the rub. As long as the Windows laptop can run the same software as the Apple laptop without making any sacrifices, the comparison is easy.

I'm not even talking about the lack of travel and that fact that they break all the time. I'm talking about the lack of Del/PgUp/PgDown/Home/End/etc.

Seriously? If we're going to take Apple out of the running over the keyboard key placement, then I'm definitely going to call out HP here as an automatic non-contender too!

I've seen recent laptops from them with the power button placed in the top right corner, just to the LEFT of the delete key, and others put small round buttons for volume up/down and other functions right above the arrow key cluster. It's like they TRIED to cause problems with those layouts! (Sadly, the apologists out there are saying t

or if you need something that the very limited range of apple laptops cannot provide, like more storage or, or, or..

Apple laptops are best if you are happy with the Apple OS, happy with the Apple keyboard, happy with shortlived laptops, etc. The apple silicon is particularly good if you are doing just the tasks blessed but Apple so you get to make use of the task specific hardware acceleration.

I think ThinkPads have greatly superior keyboards and as someone with RSI, Apple could never be in the running, because of the lack of options. I also don't like OSX, and Apple don't support Linux. Also I find life limited hardware obnoxious, and my 11 year old laptop has comfortably exceeded the support window of any apple laptop. OMG and ThinkPads are designed for field serviceability and have some really nice features, like captive screws. Yeah I care, and they use standard screw heads and don't try to lock out repairs with nasty patent shenanigans. Other companies also offer next day on site repair warranties (including accidental damage), which apple don't offer. Is or even possible anyway? With removable storage other vendors can replace the motherboard on site (I've seen this twice now).

The apple chips are good, especially at power draw, so the battery life is good. That's the one advantage (it's only Apple's incompetence that thermals were a problem on the Intel laptops). So if you judge a laptop purely by a limited selection of technical specs then Apple are best.

Its funny though, when Apple's technical specs were mediocre, fanbois bleated about "build quality" or weight or thickness etc. Now Apple have good technical specs in some aspects fanbois seem to have forgotten that apple kinda suck at the rest.

When it comes to a laptop, performance and efficiency aren't super high on my list. Needs to be decent, well, OK, but that's about it. I loved my eee900. Slow, then when new, but it was one hell of a good laptop. Wasn't even especially cheap once I upgraded the storage to 128 G.

I think Macs are nasty little machines with a great CPU. Other people love their Macs.

Apple laptops are best if you are [...] happy with shortlived laptops

Apple laptops are best if you are [...] happy with shortlived laptops

Well, that is a weird statement, to say the least. I recently powered up my Powerbook G4 (20 years old), and it worked fine. It's not something I would want to use today, of course. But more to the point: I have two Mac Laptops from 2013 and 2014 that I indeed still use productively (one still on the original battery, and it still runs for several hours). And yes, I have a choice - my main machine is a M1 MacBook Pro, but I use the old 13 inch for lectures (it's plenty fast enough for PDF slides) and the old 15 inch for VirtualBox and Linux, because I sometimes have to build code for particular configurations.

There may be exotic special cases, but in general Apple Laptops live a lot longer than nearly all Windows laptops.

Older Apple laptops live longer. You can replace the batteries yourself when they inevitably die (they are consumable). If the keyboard breaks it's only held in with a screw and a clip, not literally welded to the top part of the chassis like in modern models.

The newer ARM models are likely to age even faster, since they cannot be upgraded. With older ones you can at least add more RAM, and the even older ones could take CPU upgrades. SSD upgrades are not possible either. I can see a lot of low end Macbooks

that is a weird statement, to say the least. I recently powered up my Powerbook G4 (20 years old), and it worked fine.

that is a weird statement, to say the least. I recently powered up my Powerbook G4 (20 years old), and it worked fine.

Did you try to run a modern web browser on it that can actually load today's websites? No, and you can't and won't, because it doesn't exist. The latest tenfourfox is ancient because of the lack of PPC support for current versions of the Javascript engine. Everything about that platform has been abandoned.

There may be exotic special cases, but in general Apple Laptops live a lot longer than nearly all Windows laptops.

There may be exotic special cases, but in general Apple Laptops live a lot longer than nearly all Windows laptops.

I could still be running my K6 laptop if I wanted to for some weird reason. And I could run a modern web browser on it, too. I ditched a P4 laptop recently, it still worked.

I too have a Powerbook G4, and it powered up fine a few months ago when I thought to myself "I wonder if it still powers up?"

Is it useful? No. It can't connect to the world wide web. No, seriously. It can't. There are no, from what I can find binaries for any modern web browsers that run on Mac OS X 10.3 (which was the latest that Powerbook ran - it's possible 10.4 works too, but the bottom line is that we're looking at support that was withdrawn in the late 2000s.)

And basically that means it cannot co

I recently powered up my Powerbook G4 (20 years old), and it worked fine.

I recently powered up my Powerbook G4 (20 years old), and it worked fine.

"Powering on" is one thing, "working" is another.

I recently installed Windows 10 on a 16-year old laptop that originally came with WIndows XP.

The installation went smoothly, it automatically downloaded and installed all the drivers, it can run all the latest software. I'm using it right now via remote desktop to run a laser cutter.

Can your Powerbook G4 do that?

Luckily for us, performance and efficiency metrics are facts and not at all subjective. A processor can do so much in such a time, and consumes so much energy to accomplish that task. That's it. So... I don't see why this shouldn't be a calm, factual, and unemotional discussion.

Luckily for us, performance and efficiency metrics are facts and not at all subjective. A processor can do so much in such a time, and consumes so much energy to accomplish that task. That's it. So... I don't see why this shouldn't be a calm, factual, and unemotional discussion.

And yet the article manages to make some outlandish claims that aren't supported by these metrics and essentially says that only an ignorant person fooled by the evil reviewers would buy a "hot and noisy wintel laptop over a cool and fast apple one"

Unfortunately reviewers tend to do a poor job of gathering the data you talk about. For example, they might measure power from the wall under load, but that doesn't tell them how much power the laptop is drawing from the battery, or how long that process can run on battery power alone. Very few even test the performance variation between battery only and charger+battery.

Some of the better ones do at least check the thermals, e.g. the new M2 Air thermal throttles quite easily under load. Even then though, they do things like video encoding benchmarks that only use one codec that the M2 happens to be optimised for.

Another one that few test is if Apple's claims about things like the screen live up to their advertised specs. LTT recently reviewed a rugged Dell that gets very bright, and even though the Dell's screen is rated for lower brightness than the Mac's, it is visibly brighter and the camera confirmed it. LTT is building a new lab that will be able to make detailed measurements of stuff like that, so manufacturers like Apple are going to have to start being honest.

Luckily for us, performance and efficiency metrics are facts and not at all subjective. A processor can do so much in such a time, and consumes so much energy to accomplish that task. That's it. So... I don't see why this shouldn't be a calm, factual, and unemotional discussion.

Luckily for us, performance and efficiency metrics are facts and not at all subjective. A processor can do so much in such a time, and consumes so much energy to accomplish that task. That's it. So... I don't see why this shouldn't be a calm, factual, and unemotional discussion.

That's like saying that a car's quarter-mile time is easy to measure so we easily write down a list of the "best" cars and make a purchase decision based on that.

My Windows laptop isn't slow. It's also silent (as in, "fanless" silent), has a touch screen (with stylus) and it has way more useful software available than MacOS.

It also cost less than the cheapest Macbook.

So no, I don't want a Macbook. At any price.

On the two facets cited, those can actually get complicated, and are *rarely* examined with nuance between products. When it comes to performance, which benchmark? How well is it optimized? Is the synthetic load friendly to threading or large vector units? Even putting those aside, it is common that one product gets crowned the 'high performance' and another product gets crowned 'most performance per watt'. However I've seen: -The 'top performer' able to match 'performance per watt' if a CPU governor is

It's /. I'm sure we will keep it rational and factual...

This is going to be a calm, factual and unemotional discussion. I guess in a certain sense, you are seriously right.

For most people the question "Mac or not" is settled, either way.

I certainly do not buy a "Windows Machine", and if I needed Linux or any other OS, I would run it in an VM.

So, the only open question for myself would be: do I need for some obscure reason (which I can not imagine right now, but driver development could be one, perhaps even Game development) a specific hardware aka processor archi

I'd imagine that a lot of folks who are using Windows laptops have at least one application that doesn't run well on a Mac.

I use a Macbook Pro for work, but it certainly isn't going to replace my Windows 10 gaming PC anytime soon. It's a completely different use case.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who is forking out $1,000+ for a laptop who DOESN'T know that Macs exist.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who is forking out $1,000+ for a laptop who DOESN'T know that Macs exist.

True. But you can easily find users who haven't considered Apple laptops because they read reviews before choosing one, and Apple is left out of the review process. Also, there are many people who would be surprised to learn that you can get a good Apple laptop for around $1k. I think most people are under the impression that Apple is way more expensive at the same specs as their wintel alternatives.

Cheap(ish) laptops have existed in the low end ever since the iBook G3 - it was one of the first product lines Jobs introduced on his return to the company. That's well over 2 decades.

People use what they're used to and there ought to be a very compelling excuse for ordinary non-technical folks to switch platforms. e.g. my sister-in-law insisted my mother get a Macbook because Apple were 'so user friendly'. Mum, who had used XP for a decade, found OS X a totally different beast to the 68k Mac we had back in

"But you can easily find users who haven't considered Apple laptops because they read reviews before choosing one, and Apple is left out of the review process."

"I think most people are under the impression that Apple is way more expensive at the same specs as their wintel alternatives."

For good reason, and those who have to go on such "impressions" don't know what "same specs" are anyway, nor does such a claim say anything when the processors and software are entirely different. "Same specs" i

True. But you can easily find users who haven't considered Apple laptops because they read reviews before choosing one, and Apple is left out of the review process.

True. But you can easily find users who haven't considered Apple laptops because they read reviews before choosing one, and Apple is left out of the review process.

Pass me the tiny violin.

PS: Apple doesn't need reviews because there's only one model to choose from - "Apple".

Macs established their own niche using a specific, non-interchangeable OS, therefore have to be reviewed separately. Last time I checked, it was a PITA to install MacOS on anything other than a Mac, and if/when successful, the performance kinda sucked.

It's also the hardware. With Macs you have a limited selection of configurations, and with their laptops the spec is fixed from the factory. Nothing can be upgraded. CPU, RAM, SSD, WiFi, it's all fixed at the time of purchase. So comparing them to x86 laptops that have sockets for those things on performance alone is ignoring some very important choices.

Performance-wise, AS is good in some areas and weak in others. For gaming it's poor, even for native games. You can play some eSports titles, but not competitively. Video encoding performance is great, with the usual caveat about limited format support that all GPUs come with.

For general compute performance it depends on a lot of things, like how memory constrained the process is and the nature of the task. M2 can trade blows with some mobile x86 CPUs in some benchmarks, in others it gets trounced.

Battery life is exceptional, always is with Macs. But again, when deciding what laptop you want, you have to think about your real needs. 10 hours of battery is a full day of work and more, so do you really need 20 hours? Is it worth sacrificing other things to get the extra battery life you won't use?

Is it worth sacrificing other things to get the extra battery life you won't use? A flight can easily be 14h or more. And by accident the charger is in the checked luggage, or the power plug is not compatible. You also can charge your mobile etc. from an USB port from the laptop. I would most likely go for the longest battery option possible, if it does not lead to a sacrisfice elsewhere.

and with their laptops the spec is fixed from the factory. True on the current product line. Not true for older models.

A flight can easily be 14h or more. And by accident the charger is in the checked luggage, or the power plug is not compatible.

A flight can easily be 14h or more. And by accident the charger is in the checked luggage, or the power plug is not compatible.

What is the percentage of people who 1) regularly fly 14h flights and 2) regularly forget to have a compatible charger handy?

You also can charge your mobile etc. from an USB port from the laptop.

You also can charge your mobile etc. from an USB port from the laptop.

Doesn't it work the opposite way, too? These days you should be able to power a laptop from a compatible USB battery pack. That might help you solve your 14h flight problem.

Who cares what the percentage is?

These days you should be able to power a laptop from a compatible USB battery pack. That might help you solve your 14h flight problem. This would add another item one can forget, or needs to charge on the trip.

So is it worth sacrificing performance, upgrade options and choice of things like ports and form factor, all just in case you forget to pack your charger in your carry on and need to do 14 hours of work in one stretch?

A flight can easily be 14h or more. And by accident the charger is in the checked luggage, or the power plug is not compatible. You also can charge your mobile etc. from an USB port from the laptop.

A flight can easily be 14h or more. And by accident the charger is in the checked luggage, or the power plug is not compatible. You also can charge your mobile etc. from an USB port from the laptop.

Ummm, the laptops with longest battery life are actually Windows laptops:

https://www.laptopmag.com/arti... [laptopmag.com]

With Macs you have a limited selection of configurations, and with their laptops the spec is fixed from the factory. Nothing can be upgraded. CPU, RAM, SSD, WiFi, it's all fixed at the time of purchase. So comparing them to x86 laptops that have sockets for those things on performance alone is ignoring some very important choices.

With Macs you have a limited selection of configurations, and with their laptops the spec is fixed from the factory. Nothing can be upgraded. CPU, RAM, SSD, WiFi, it's all fixed at the time of purchase. So comparing them to x86 laptops that have sockets for those things on performance alone is ignoring some very important choices.

Yes, it would be ignoring some very important choices. But you seem to be ignoring the fact that most Wintel laptops these days are also similarly configured at the factory and not after-market upgradable. It's been a long time since you could buy Gateway laptops you could open up to replace the CPU, RAM and HDD accompanied by docking stations with PCI slots. The laptop world has moved on to fully integrated solutions which is not a step forward, IMNSHO.

It's also the hardware. With Macs you have a limited selection of configurations, and with their laptops the spec is fixed from the factory. Nothing can be upgraded. CPU, RAM, SSD, WiFi, it's all fixed at the time of purchase. So comparing them to x86 laptops that have sockets for those things on performance alone is ignoring some very important choices.

The problem is Macs and Windows laptops aren't really comparable. You want upgradable laptops, they're not going to be as "nice" as the Macs - they're going

It's also the hardware. With Macs you have a limited selection of configurations, and with their laptops the spec is fixed from the factory. Nothing can be upgraded. CPU, RAM, SSD, WiFi, it's all fixed at the time of purchase. So comparing them to x86 laptops that have sockets for those things on performance alone is ignoring some very important choices.

It's also the hardware. With Macs you have a limited selection of configurations, and with their laptops the spec is fixed from the factory. Nothing can be upgraded. CPU, RAM, SSD, WiFi, it's all fixed at the time of purchase. So comparing them to x86 laptops that have sockets for those things on performance alone is ignoring some very important choices.

What percentage of x86 laptop buyers ever upgrade their laptops? And upgrading a MacBook has always been super easy. 1. Make a Time Machine backup (you should have that anyway). 2. Wipe your MacBook. 3. Sell it on eBay for lots of money. 4. Buy the MacBook that you want. 5. Restore the Time Machine backup.

I can also open a full command shell on Windows and run those exact same commands and I use them every day.

And the new hardware dont run any other OS very well.

Which is a shame because for a while MacOS, with its Unix foundations, had great potential.

Apple made sure it didn't live up to that.

NeXTStep, which was reasonably performant on a 25 MHz 68040, had potential. Apple ruined it right out of the gate by somehow making OSX less responsive on a PPC than NeXTStep was on a 68k. Your average Mac fan knows nothing about any other kind of computer, so they don't notice.

Stating the obvious here, but unless you've got a trivial workload a Wintel laptop and an Apple Silicon laptop are not interchangeable. Most people are going to have software they want/need to use that isn't available on both platforms. Even if it is available for both, they might only have a license for one platform, which will heavily influence their hardware choices.

Do you need software that's only on Windows? Then it doesn't matter matter if the Mac is faster because it can't do the task you need.

Do you want to play games? You're going to be a lot happier with the Windows laptop.

Are you an iOS developer? You have no choice but to get the Mac.

We can go on and on with examples in each direction if we wanted.

You could compare Apple and Wintel laptops directly when the Apple machines had the option of dual booting into Windows. Without that option, they're just not interchangeable machines. An amazing screwdriver does you no good if the task at hand requires nails.

What's more interesting is that some ports of multiplatform software won't run as fast on Macs as they will on PCs. Not in the notebook world specifically, mind you . . . but Macs aren't that impressive running Cinebench R23, for example, and they're even less-impressive running handbrake. Not that you'd run either one of those applications on a notebook. Not seriously anyway. The broader point is that once you take Apple's fixed function hardware off the table, M1 and M2 don't hold up quite as well.

Unless you've got a trivial workload a Wintel laptop and an Apple Silicon laptop are not interchangeable

Unless you've got a trivial workload a Wintel laptop and an Apple Silicon laptop are not interchangeable

For a professional, maybe. But for the sort of person reading the New York Times for a laptop recommendation? Solid chance they have a "trivial workload" that could easily be done on either platform. I'd expect a very high percentage of the average user's need to be for things that can be done in a web browser, and the remainder to be simple photo editing/printing, or document manipulation.

Stating the obvious here, but unless you've got a trivial workload a Wintel laptop and an Apple Silicon laptop are not interchangeable. Most people are going to have software they want/need to use that isn't available on both platforms.

Stating the obvious here, but unless you've got a trivial workload a Wintel laptop and an Apple Silicon laptop are not interchangeable. Most people are going to have software they want/need to use that isn't available on both platforms.

Many people have what you call "trivial workload" : web browsing, e-mail, watching videos, etc. Many people just use a Chromebook. Many people are happy with a tablet. A comparative review would be very interesting

...You're only 35-ish years late figuring this out.

The mainstream press' selective blindless to anything other than x86 PCs is a phenomenon that is very familiar to enthusiasts of the Mac, Amiga, Atari-ST, Acorn Archimedes, the NeXT box, Sun workstations, DEC Alpha stations, the BeBox, and many others. And it is every bit a disservice to the public today as it was back then.

Hardware is hardware. The majority of peeps out there want compatibility and to be able to play most if not all games etc etc. macOS does not allow that in the slightest if we're being honest. Ppl care about what they can run and do moreso over bang for buck hardware-wise. . . .

Hardware is hardware. The majority of peeps out there want compatibility and to be able to play most if not all games etc etc. macOS does not allow that in the slightest if we're being honest. Ppl care about what they can run and do moreso over bang for buck hardware-wise. . . .

This really is the issue. You cannot compare Macs with Windows because they Apples and oranges. (Sorry!) Boot Camp does not work on Apple Silicon. If I could install everything I needed for my business on a MacOS laptop, my personal business laptop would absolutely be a Mac because I can imagine some occasions where the crazy battery life comes in handy. I cannot. There is so much software written for Windows and only Windows that I would have to start making compromises, and I would still need a Windows ma

Give Wintel boxes bad reviews, you'll find that you stop getting them sent to you for review. No reviewer ever wants to buy their own stuff because then it will be reviews weeks or even months after everyone else has written up their freebie stuff and you look out of touch.

Which in itself means that reviews are never in-depth and never tell you about the stuff you only discover after six months of use. Because reviewers' target audiences are generally habitual review readers and other review writers, not actual buyers. Actual buyers are not all conveniently waiting with their cash to rush out and buy hardware on the day of general release.

neither Windows nor MacOS are acceptable as OSes for very different reasons. Windows for its poor quality and MacOS for more ethical and political reasons.

neither Windows nor MacOS are acceptable as OSes for very different reasons. Windows for its poor quality and MacOS for more ethical and political reasons.

You think there are more ethical and political reasons to avoid MacOS than there are to avoid Windows? Exactly how much crack are you on?

Windows for its poor quality

Windows for its poor quality

It's funny how you people keep saying things like this. You seem to think that if you say it enough that it will come true.

Over the years I've had far more trouble out of poor quality with Linux than I have had with Windows. Trying to get Linux to support standard hardware in many cases is a hit or miss. Trying to find the right set up to get your sound working. Hit or miss bluetooth support. Then there is the idiots over at gnome deciding to change standards because they think "their way is better.

Nothing wrong with Apple aside from the walled garden approach but it's still a niché use case device. There is so much I do on a daily basis and so many applications I use that are exclusive to Windows. I get it, it's just me but I just couldn't use Apple, there are no equivalents.

Not only that but even if I could why would I want to when the cost isn't in the hardware it's in the software? Having to re-buy and shift platform would cost me 10* what the hardware costs me let alone the time to re-learn

That's because people interested enough in a Windows laptop to be reading a review about it, don't really care about a device which doesn't run Windows.

What distinguishes Apple from Google in this case is that Apple actually makes a device that has comparable specs to the "ultrabooks" being reviewed by NYT. Is there a Chromebook out there that you'd say is a reasonable contender for being "the best ultrabook"?

Apple silicon wins handily in both performance and efficiency — is not going to be popular with a large segment of their audience

Apple silicon wins handily in both performance and efficiency — is not going to be popular with a large segment of their audience

And a hell of a lot less popular with their advertisers. The PC (and Intel based laptop) market is much bigger than the Apple market. The advertising industry reflects that. If reviewers start to criticise the products of their major advertisers - effectively negating their costly adverts - by saying "buy stuff from someone else" then those advertisers will take their cheque-books elsewhere.

There is no such thing as a truly neutral review. Not as long as the reviewer gains something from a supplier: money

....in the enterprise space. Quite some years ago, let's say 2015, I noticed nearly every one of our vendor's reps - Cisco, Brocade, etc - apart from HP & Dell, were all using Macbooks. And then in 2019 there was this story about Mac users at IBM: https://www.extremetech.com/co... [extremetech.com]

Over the past few years, in places I have worked with, the Apple laptops have been disappearing. Especially for developers they have just been slowly going away. The company still offers them when it is time for your laptop upgrade but fewer people are choosing them. Just too many incompatibilities with everything else. Even for developers there are libraries that have good Linux and Windows support but no Mac support.

The term "best laptop" is entirely subjective and is going to be different for everyone since everyone has different use cases. Saying X is best is just stupid without qualifying the statement.

Reviews should be more subjective and concentrate on quantifiable facts such as performance, battery life, cost etc. Even performance is subjective, because what matters is performance running the things you're actually going to run.

A $1300 dell can in no way be perceived "better" than a $1000 apple which is faster and

Either you want to be in Apple's walled garden, or you don't. Features and price don't really matter: if you want an Apple product, you don't care about Dell or Microsoft products. If, like me, you do *not* want to be in that walled garden, then there's no point in seeing reviews of Apple products.

I've just ordered a new computer. Apple wasn't even remotely an option, because I want bare metal to install Linux on. In fact, this will be the first computer in a long time where I won't even have a Windows partition. Gaming under Linux, with Steam, is now "good enough". At most, maybe I'll put Windows in a VM, just in case someone sends me one of those scripted PDFs that only Adobe products can open.

I'm fascinated by the swipe at Apple for being a walled garden, but at the same time you're somehow comfortable being beholden to Steam.

Most people appear to read reviews to confirm their pre-existing views; those who genuinely look for unbiased data to make a rational decision are relatively rare (even amongst such superior beings as Slashdot readers).

Change can be scary and the familiar comforting.

Given that, the reviews will naturally gravitate to target markets, and as Windows users are the more populous they will get the focus (and the advertising revenue). The masses will read Wintel reviews, the Apple fans will read the Mac reviews -- and the rest of us pick a Linux flavour and tend to stick with that.

2022 is the year of Linux on the desktop, I'm absolutely sure of it.

-- Sent from my iPhone

https://youtu.be/FWfJq0Y4Oos [youtu.be]

> Are Apple's new Silicon-powered laptops sometimes being left out of comparisons because they're more expensive?

Comparing Wintel laptops and Mac laptops is like comparing airplanes and helicopters: both fly, but other than that, they have nothing in common.

My point is, if I was on the market for a laptop, I wouldn't even consider a Mac laptop in the first place - because I don't want anything to do with the Apple ecosystem. So all I want to know is which non-Apple laptop might interest me. The reviews tell me that, that's perfect for me.

And I suspect the reviewers assume it's also what most other people are interested in: those who want Apple will naturally look for Mac-centric review, while everybody else don't want the distraction of having to filter out a platform they don't give a shit about.

Yes but that doesn't provide a reason to not review them side by side.

All the gnashing of teeth from the "I hate Mac" now what's the question crowd ignores the fact that the reason for their claimed preference is just familiarity. Case in point the poster above claiming that he could never use a Mac because it has a gimped One Note app - ignoring the fact that there are myriad, probably better, apps running on Mac. That's a question of familiarity, its does not in any way demonstrate superiority.

Actually, if you review all the Windows laptops that are in the name price range as the Macbooks you will find that all them are superior in almost every way. Even Windows laptops that are half the price of m1/m2 laptops are pretty close.

You'd be hard pressed to argue the physicists are pretentious over their choice of computer.

You'd be hard pressed to argue the physicists are pretentious over their choice of computer.

Of course they are. Physicists are humans, pretty much like everybody else. Case in point: physicists were also using Apple even before the M1, when Apple hardware was crap compared to state of the art workhorse laptops.

Most of us that use Macs use them because the hardware is usually solid

Most of us that use Macs use them because the hardware is usually solid

Apple has made many, many machines with weird quirks that cause problems. And they have done since the Macintosh II days.

the OS interface doesn't look like ass

the OS interface doesn't look like ass

Subjective. Apple's candy coating looks like a toy to me. Also, it wasn't that long ago the Apple was shipping components with three different GUIs in their OS at the same time, although since they ditched iTunes (which is worthy of an entire bitchpost itself) it's probably only two now.

and we do not have to put up with MS (bad interface design, constant phoning home,

and we do not have to put up with MS (bad interface design, constant phoning home,

Apple is part of PRISM, so if you're assuming that they're not spying on you, you're only kidding yourself (and the other Mac users who like to play pretend, which is all of you.)

Apple has failed hard at security again and again, and been rescued only by relative lack of popularity. For example their ASLR implemenation outright did not work at all for literally years. But there's less motivation to target an OS that is never ever used as a server any more (since Apple killed their server product) and which has only a tiny percentage of the market of people who do real work.

and their OS generally smells like a public toilet that no one ever cleans).

and their OS generally smells like a public toilet that no one ever cleans).

Wow, smelling software. I've heard of synesthesia, but this is a new one for me. OSX is technically inferior to Linux in every way, and is practically inferior to Windows in many ways. I do see they're pulling the same bullshit as Microsoft where they're making it difficult to run Linux on the metal but giving you an easy way to run it inside of their OS so they can spy on it.

PC weenies are chronically religious, and always have been.

PC weenies are chronically religious, and always have been.

You haven't known many Mac users, have you? I've been to 68k-days UG meetings, I know what the Macintosh fanboys are like. Mostly, self-deluded. Every UG meeting necessarily includes a bunch of self-reassurance.

so the bigger question is: "why is the questioner ignoring AMD?"

so the bigger question is: "why is the questioner ignoring AMD?"

That is because to the typical corporate suit, AMD is low end crap. Of course this isn't true with many AMD processors at least equal to and in some cases clearly superior to their Intel count parts. But the myth still remains, as does the saying "nobody gets fired for buying intel."

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