> you can get better EVERYTHING outside their hardware
I'm pretty sure my M1 MacBook Air was the most powerful fanless laptop on the market when I bought it, and there were just a few laptops with comparable battery life.
I'm also pretty sure it had a GPU. (still has one)
College students often prioritize battery life because they are away from chargers for so many hours of the day. And you absolutely have to admit the M1 Macs really just destroy Windows and Linux in terms of battery life.
Regardless, there are very practical reasons to have different priorities than yours.
> OH man! Victim of Apple marketing right here. You have an integrated GPU in your CPU.
Dude, I know what an integrated GPU is (and it's certainly not "GPU in your CPU").
You're not smarter than everyone else for having a laptop with a dedicated GPU and running Linux on it. You haven't found a magical loophole in the laptop market by not buying Apple. You're just prioritizing different stuff than Apple users.
>You're not smarter than everyone else for having a laptop with a dedicated GPU and running Linux on it.
Sure there are 7B people in the world!
But I'm def smarter than people who spend $2500 on a few GB ram and no GPU. Plato suggests its wrong for smart people to be humble, it allows dumb people to step up and make their points.
If you arent compiling for iOS, you made an inefficient decision. There is a reason Apple is found on low to middle income consumer households, and not found in B2B. Guess which is most susceptible to emotional marketing.
> I'm def smarter than people who spend $2500 on a few GB ram and no GPU
Tell that to Linus Torvalds, seen using a few different MacBooks over the years. So far, you've made the impression of an arrogant nobody who doesn't know what a GPU is.
> Apple is found on low to middle income consumer households
To be fair my personal anecdotal experience seems to match that sentiment (as an Apple technician).
It doesn't mean that rich people do also have Apple stuff (especially the iPhone) but at least for computers many of the rich people I know went with a Windows computer and stuck with it (because it made more financial sense).
The cliché is a struggling artist with a nice Apple laptop and it's not without any merit.
There was a time where indeed an Apple computer offered you some stuff that wasn't available elsewhere or at least in a significantly worse way (desktop print, illustration, audio type of stuff).
But then in the 2000s it leveled off. To the point Adobe made some marketing stating that an equivalently priced PC was faster to run their software. It wasn't that successful because at this point Macs were already iconic status symbol but still.
Nowadays I see a lot of creators just switching to Windows PC for convenience and power. I follow some YouTube channels where the person got his start on a Mac but then switched to PC because Premiere Pro is good enough and it is rather useful to have access to all the 3D software with a powerful GPU for rendering.
While Apple was busy creating their island walled garden software support has become way too atrocious because developers got tired both of their business practice and ever-changing APIs/framework that makes it not worthwhile to support a large software for the small userbase.
People can't shut up about Apple Silicon but outside of efficiency it is just about competitive and not so much in other ways (max power, GPU).
We will see how the ARM rollout pans out in the Windows world (I don't have much faith; the importance of efficiency is largely overstated and is a use case already met with Chromebooks for the most part) and if it works out it might be better for cross-compilation for macOS but then again Apple Silicon is not exactly standard ARM and it leaves the biggest problem of an exotic GPU with specific way of handling things.
I fear Apple may have put themselves into a corner just like in the PPC days by trying to be too different and "special" for short term gains.
I'm pretty sure my M1 MacBook Air was the most powerful fanless laptop on the market when I bought it, and there were just a few laptops with comparable battery life.
I'm also pretty sure it had a GPU. (still has one)