[nateb2022]

> So, what is the battery life on that device? One hour? Two hours?

I'd put the average battery life of a $600-700 gaming laptop at ~4-6hr, although if you undervolt the CPU (getting maybe 80% of the performance) you could achieve 8+ hours on a charge. Screens vary, but they're typically 1280x1080 -- however at 120/144Hz. I'd say both are acceptable for most people.

And I am not claiming to compete against the MacBook Air 15" for $600-700. I am just pointing out that performance-wise, a $600-700 gaming laptop can equal a $1200 Macbook, and hence is a much better value.

If however you want me to find a challenger to your MacBook Air 15", I will.

With a $1200 base 15" M2 Macbook Air budget, you can get a Dell XPS 15 for $1,149 (https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptops/12th-gen-intel/spd/x...). The i7-12700H equals the M2 in single-core and beats the M2 in multi-core workloads. It comes with a RTX 3050, 16 GB of DDR5, and a 512GB SSD, and a 3456x2160 OLED touch display. You get 8GB more RAM, twice the storage, a better GPU and multi-core performance than the base model Mac Air for $50 less. Battery lasts up to 13 hours.

I am admittedly also an Apple fan, but that doesn't mean I have my eyes on the competition. While Apple has had its share of advances, and while it is still my go-to for my laptops, I will be the first to admit that there are plenty of alternatives depending on what you're looking for. And some of those alternatives are hands-down a better value depending on your criteria.

[bradknowles]

If you're looking for a gaming laptop, then I agree that Apple doesn't have good solutions in that space. That's primarily because there's not much in the way of good games that run on macOS. Hopefully, that will change with the new game porting kit that Apple has announced, but there's no way to tell right now.

But while 13 hours of battery runtime is quite good by Intel/Windows standards, it's still not the 18 hours you can get with the MacBook Air 15".

It's very clear that Apple has decided to optimize for certain things in their designs, and battery lifetime is one of them. They'll take a slight hit on CPU performance to get that. And most people won't notice the minor loss in CPU performance, but they will notice the significant increase in battery runtime.

[nateb2022]

There are Windows contenders that do offer comparable battery life to Macbooks, if that's your criteria. The $549 Acer Swift 3 (i7-1165G7, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) gets up to 16 hours, and the $799 Asus ZenBook 13 (i7-8565U, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD) gets up to 15 hours.

Performance is close enough to Apple silicon that both laptops would be acceptable competitors for a general consumer's uses, RAM and storage are equal to if not better than Apple's base model Air's, and the price is unquestionably better.

Apple does strike a good balance, but it most definitely isn't leagues ahead of any other company no matter which way you look at it.

[seanmcdirmid]

If you want a display comparable to an MBA, the Dell XPS starts at $1449 (according to your link).

[nateb2022]

Indeed, although that extra display is optional. For a MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD (with the XPS still beating it for CPU & GPU), you'll pay $1,499 which again is a $50 savings. I personally don't place too much value in a screen but that's due to my workload, I'm sure that people who do video/graphics work would want the premium screen.

[seanmcdirmid]

I wouldn’t buy a 1X resolution screen in 2023. I’m surprised they are actually still sold, the quicker we move up to modern resolutions being standard the quicker we can just call them the new 1X and stop all the resolution hackery we have to do to support both at the same time these days.