try one of the newer amd or intel (TSMC-made) CPUs. its pretty much the same. keep in mind the battery size too. mbp has a huge and very heavy battery (the mbp is super heavy)
HP has Ubuntu-certified strix halo machines for example.
there's a few different reasons:
- its pushed by gov (it gives full access to machines, huge backdoor)
- its not actually the worst of its kind, sadly
- their threat database is good (ie it will catch stuff)
- it lets you look at everything on the machine (not the only one, but, its def. useful)
- its big - cant be faulted for "we had it and we got pwned" - yep, sad as well
If operating systems weren't as poop as they are today, this would not be necessary - but here we are. And I bet you major OS manufacturers will not really fix their OSes without ensuring its just a fully walled garden (terrible for devs.. but you'll probably just run a linux vm for dev on top..). Bad intents lead to bad software.
HP has Ubuntu-certified strix halo machines for example.