My $2.2k laptop can't drive two screens

The competition can run multiple displays. The competition has built in window tiling shortcuts. The competition has built in clipboard history. The competition doesn't open up your music player every time you connect your earbuds. The competition doesn't require carrying around HDMI and ethernet adapters everywhere you go.

Apple is garbage, Macbooks are garbage, Windows + WSL beats them for every development task and in general productivity.

Nah. Apple tells you what you're getting for your money in plain old English in white and black. If you don't read it, that's on you.

M3 Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at 1 billion colors and: One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz

M3 Pro Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at 1 billion colors and: Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, or one external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 144Hz over HDMI One external display supported at 8K resolution at 60Hz or one external display at 4K resolution at 240Hz over HDMI

M3 Max Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at 1 billion colors and: Up to four external displays: Up to three external displays with 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 144Hz over HDMI Up to three external displays: Up to two external displays with 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one external display with up to 8K resolution at 60Hz or one external display with 4K resolution at 240Hz over HDMI

See also: American Airways absolutely refused to fly me first class when I only bought a cattle-class ticket. No, I didn't read any of the fine-print, but my ticket cost a load of money. American Airways need to fix their substandard product.

Counterpoint: driving two screens is something a $500 Windows laptop could easily do years ago so Apple offering a "pro" MBP that can't do this is a surprising choice especially when other MBP laptops have been able to do so in the past at similar price points. That this is because the "pro" laptop actually uses a mobile chip just means it's misleading advertising by using the established MBP brand to sell a completely different product.

You should generally assume your customer is an idiot and while it is legal to take advantage of customers being idiots, it's still deliberately abusive and not something Apple is known for doing given its reputation.

His criticism is valid: this is not a product matching what customers are used to from the MBP product line and it's even labelled as "pro" suggesting more capabilities not fewer (though of course this is technically correct relative to the non-pro version of the same model). He doesn't feel "a little guilty and self conscious", he feels scammed and taken advantage of. Was it a scam? I don't think so, but it was (deliberately or unintentionally) misleading advertising.

Yeah, that's going to come down to personal preference. I find using a Mac to be a much more productive / enjoyable experience, especially for creative work. There are apps to address all of those software issues (having to install noTunes is kind of annoying for sure). And I will say, I prefer my OS to _not_ jam ads and tracking down my throat.

But to each their own.

The reason why non-Pro-chip MacBooks can't drive three displays is very simple: Apple gives each display its own SRAM buffer to scan out from, separate from the main system RAM. The display controllers on Apple chips are literally larger than the CPU cores because of this.

The reason why they do this is because it lets them run system RAM at lower power or suspend it entirely without affecting the displays. Which saves a good chunk of power - AFAIK after Asahi added support for the display coprocessor firmware (which implements this trick) they got a few extra hours of battery life.

My main complaint is that you can't turn off the primary laptop display to get an extra external display back. That's probably why most people need >2 display controllers in their laptops. Though AFAIK this may have been fixed in the M3?