[wwtrv]

> and the pricetag at 2-3x a similarly-performing windows equivalent, and probably +50% on similar screen windows equivalent.

Can you actually list any of these "equivalents"? I'm actually genuinely curious

Just to get this straight you're saying that you can get a Windows laptop that's just as fast, has comparable battery life and build quality as an M3 Air for $400-650 (i.e. 1/3 - 1/2 of the cheapest 16 GB Air)? Really?

> Unfortunately it is far too easy for a non-savvy person

So could you help those of use who are not that savvy by being more specific?

[Rinzler89]

>Can you actually list any of these "equivalents"? I'm actually genuinely curious

I paid ~780 Euros a year ago for a 14" Lenovo with an 8 core AMD Ryzen 7840HS, 32GB LPDDR5X and 1TB NVME, and 2560x1600 IPS display. I can't justify spending double the Euros for a Mac with less RAM and storage. I just can't. Now you can even get laptops with OLED screens for that price.

Oh and best of all, the screen can open almost 180 degrees meaning I can prop it up higher on a portable flip stand for better neck ergonomics and still view the screen at a 90 degree angle VS MacBooks which can only open ~135 degrees reducing the positions at which you can use the machine as the moment I prop it up, the screen faces my chest instead of my face while opened all the way.

Macs may be technically superior on paper but they have all these design quirks and limitations because they only want you to use the products in this very specific way that one design guru in Cupertino though of is the right way to use a laptop while looking cool, and I say screw that, I'm the customer, I should be able to use it however I think is best for me.

If I were doing stuff like photo/video editing for a living or developing iOS or MacOS apps, a MacBook would totally be worth it due to it being better for those tasks (or the only option), but for my own use cases of web + Windows + Linux + light PC gaming, Apple's products make no sense to me especially given their prices in Europe compared to Col and wages.

[diffeomorphism]

From my recent purchase decision:

14 macbook pro, 32gb of ram, 1tb of storage, 120Hz high res sceen: 2900€

HP Elitebook, same specs, same weight, etc.: 1200€

https://www.campuspoint.de/hp-elitebook-845-g11-sondermodell...

Surely, the macbook pro will be better in some ways but at that price difference "better" is just not good enough.

[lynguist]

A Macbook Air M3 is significantly faster than this HP Elitebook in for example compilation tasks.

I don’t know about all of you but in my day to day work I compile code very often, and I used personally a work issued M2 Air and a work issued HP Elitebook Raptor Lake. The M2 Air was leaps faster, leaps.

Some older and more traditional colleague who had a Alder Lake workstation laptop was surprised how much faster the M2 was to his machine.

[diffeomorphism]

The M3? No, the opposite. It is pretty much a wash with the M3 Pro and for 3x the price this is not at all "significant".

[Panzer04]

I don't think you could find a windows laptop with comparable build quality (or display quality, which I consider important if you intend to use a laptop for its intended purpose) for 1/2 the price of the air. I do think you could find a laptop in the same performance ballpark (ie. 75%+ of the single core speed, which seems to be where the newest gen Intel mobile chips sit in comparison). This is a bigger difference than I expected, admittedly, though the gap closes if you care about multicore performance numbers.

Here in AU, a 16GB air with 512GB SSD = 2400AUD. The base model (8/256)) = 1800 AUD.

I would consider an appropriate comparison model to the air to be something like this: https://www.harveynorman.com.au/acer-swift-go-evo-14-inch-co...

For 1/2 the price, you get a laptop with an OLED screen and one of the newest/fastest non-M3 processors you can buy. It also happened to be the cheapest laptop with a new Meteor lake processor I could find, though I'd have to imagine there are laptops with worse specifications in other areas for the cheaper.

You can obviously spend up from there to improve build quality, get more SSD space (probably by swapping out the stock NVMe drive), more RAM (if you're lucky maybe they have SODIMMs, though I'd guess most laptops, especially non-16", might have soldered memory).

In terms of non-savvy vs savvy, mostly it's that a non-savvy laptop buyer, generally speaking, doesn't understand:

- Screen quality/tech. Resolution, TN vs IPS vs OLED, matte vs gloss, maximum brightness

- How different processor generations compare. Especially walking into a store, it's common in my experience for laptops with 5500u (Zen 2 6 core) to be sitting next to a laptop with a new eg. 125H, both at similar prices. The newer processor is the pick (performance wise), but this is completely nonobvious. It's particularly bad at lower specs, where you can have an i3 N300 (8 e cores) next to perhaps a Ryzen 5700u or Intel 13600h...

In theory salespeople should lead them in the right direction, but likely as not they can spend twice as much on a fancy laptop that looks schmick (and probably is) when they could get 90% of the same experience with something like the Acer above. eg: https://www.harveynorman.com.au/hp-envy-x360-14-inch-ultra-7...

This is admittedly a 2in1, and it has a better processor, but it could well be worse in every other way.