[bigyabai]

> it’s less ‘apple owners are supposed to have money,’ more ‘owners are dumb enough to part with it.’

It's both. A fool and his money are easily parted, it's no coincidence that you're supposed to Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. When you stop having money to give to Apple, they stop rendering services, hardware support and developer tooling.

I like ElementaryOS but I'd give modern GNOME a serious look too. Something like Fedora feels closer to the modern Mac experience than ElementaryOS does, these days. But it's all pretty subjective so you may as well try both once you find a laptop you like.