Ask HN: Is There a MacBook Equivalent?

I am looking to renew my piece (Dell XPS) and I am thinking about an M4 Max maxed out. My budget is $4-5k.

I'd rather buy a non-apple hardware but after only 3 years of use for this Dell: The charger broke and it was hard finding replacement because it is a specific model, the battery barely last for an hour now, the touch screen went crazy just after one year and is useless now, the "carbon fibre" casing ridiculously aged as if it is 10+yo, microphone still not supported although that's a minor issue.

Also I don't have any proof but I think its overall performance degraded although not significantly.

I've used Apple Macbooks before and they had issues but when they worked , they worked great. I'd rather buy a Linux laptop but I couldn't find anything that can match the M4 Max or come close.

Anecdotal but I have all of my Apple laptops going back to the late 90s all still in working order. The only machines I can think of with a similar build quality was the IBM era ThinkPad range. I’ve never used a Dell laptop that didn’t have something off about it.

System76 makes good quality Linux laptops.

Looks rather competitve: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m4-vs-amd-ryzen-...

Their website improved significantly. I remember I interacted with one of them 3 or 4 years ago and they were rather bulky. I wonder how much they have improved since then?

If I were buying a non Mac laptop today it’d likely be a Framework. Their laptops don’t feel as premium, imo, but the fact you can repair nearly every single thing on the laptop yourself makes up for a lot of it. I don’t think they’re very directly comparable to a MacBook, they’re two products with fairly different ideologies behind them. Other than that I’ve been largely unimpressed by non-Apple laptop offerings.