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Since home office I no longer have a laptop.
Good answer. A refurb Dell desktop tower or smaller form will get ya 10-20 years service vs. the 5 tops of the laptop (excluding battery and screen for generous comparison because they may fail sooner). Also laptops just seem to do sucky stuff like keyboard randomly stops working. Laptops suck.
from UX, devx, and raw cpu performance combined.
There is nothing even there to research. Unless you have some religious intolerance to macos platform for whatever reasons.
But even then you’re way better of $/cpu than most “competitors” if you just buy parallels desktop on top of it.
Except for some specific niche applications like heavy gaming etc.
Forget the metal dings. The new ones have smoother edges, I think. Run an automatic backup to somewhere else.
The hardware is so so so much better than anything else out there there's not really a comparison. I doubt anyone else would catch up within 5 years either.
At the end of the day they're just tools, not some religious argument. At this point in time they're substantially better than anything else, by a large margin, especially for dev and creative work.
I also use IntelliJ and Photoshop side by side, and these crazy machines last the whole day on battery power without the fans ever kicking on or anything getting slow. The poor throttled Thinkpad X1 isn't even remotely close in performance.
Shrug. Sorry, probably not the answer you wanted to hear. But Apple did some serious engineering in those while Microsoft and Intel sat on their butts for a decade.
I've looked at Thinkpads and all the good ones are well over that price.
My priority is light weight and at least a 16GB/512GB combination. The only laptop I could find that meets this, based on suggestions in other comments, is the LG Gram.
I grew up with Asus and Acer and then Dells and Alienwares and Surface Books and ThinkPads and Razers, comfortably in the Wintel world. But the Apple Silicon laptops are so far ahead it's not even a comparison. Especially if you want to be able to run Photoshop natively (ie not emulated in Linux). Forget the metal dings. The new ones have smoother edges, I think. Run an automatic backup to somewhere else. The hardwar…
It's validation. Windows has gone downhill, Apple locks you in, you use Linux on principle.
Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen 7840U
LG Gram 14"
HP Elitebook 845 G10
MacBook Air M2
Lenovo Thinkpad T14s
Since home office I no longer have a laptop.
I get 4-5x the performance of my last work laptop (Dell XPS i9) for the same price. It's dead silent and has a ton of ports.
My personal hardware recommendation would be a Thinkpad of some sort. I'm using a Thinkpad X1 Yoga right now. It survived a 4 or 5 foot drop onto a tile floor recently; I had to disassemble it to reseat the touchpad and fans that got knocked out of place, and the aluminum chassis now has dents on the corners, but the laptop overall took it like a champ. Even if you don't get a Thinkpad, make sure to go for something with a metal chassis.
I strongly encourage you to avoid Apple hardware as they solder storage. Soldered RAM is common enough that I won't complain about it too much, but in my case, I recently upgraded my Thinkpad from 512 GB to 2 TB storage for a mere $100 (Black Friday deals FTW!). Unless you are really good with a desoldering setup, there is no way you could do that to a Macbook.
Since home office I no longer have a laptop.
Same. I kept using laptops for many years after moving to home office but last year decided to go back to a desktop (micro-ATX build). I get 4-5x the performance of my last work laptop (Dell XPS i9) for the same price. It's dead silent and has a ton of ports.