[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.