Which is funny because while current 14' and 16' MBPs are very ahead of competition, previous generation was dogshit in terms of quality, and had a lot of this "blue sky innovation" that decreased usability - like the touch bar.
The M1 and M2 (and the benefits from them, like ridiculous battery life, low heat (enough so that you can run it totally fanless unless you're outside in the direct sun or something), and more importantly desktop-comparable speed for even heavy tasks like photo/video editing are really, really good. Honestly unless you're required to run windows, it makes a macbook kind of a no brainer right now, especially if you have other ios devices.
Or Linux, at this stage. Apple silicon support is not good enough yet to be a pleasant experience. Sure, an x86 laptop doesn't compete with power efficiency of the M1/M2 - might be useful if you regularly need to go multiple days without power, but my x86 laptop already gets more than 8 hours battery which is "good enough", and is just as fast for development usage (I have an M1 MBP too, I have tested this side by side).
As a bonus I have full control of the hardware and the software that I want to run on it. I almost never reach for the Macbook unless I need to test something OSX specific.
I made a similar comment down below..there are many good laptops out there and it's insane what we take for granted now. High PPI super-bright screens, 8+ hour battery life, < 1" thick, < 2lbs, 2tb+ nvme ssd, etc.
I work in the microsoft stack but I use parallels on a MBP.
> importantly desktop-comparable speed for even heavy tasks like photo/video editing are really, really good
Because it has dedicated hardware to make photo & video editing good. Which is great, if that's your jam. It's dead silicon if it isn't, though. M1/M2 strike a great balance for performance & battery life, absolutely. But it's very narrow in what it can achieve desktop-comparable speeds on when it comes to heavy workloads, and other laptops are drastically faster at rather large areas of consumer computing like gaming.
> Honestly unless you're required to run windows, it makes a macbook kind of a no brainer right now
Or if you're just a casual / lite user but want something other than 13.3", which is the only size Apple offers an economical model. Or if you really like having a touch screen, which Apple refuses to do for some reason. That second point is basically the entire reason my SO is hunting for alternatives to the Air.
You're right..the lack of a touch screen is weird.
I do use mine for dev work/etc though (M1) and it's completely fine, even with only 8gb. I've never had any slowdowns or felt like it was holding me back.
> Very generally, Java is one of those things. CPU performance is really, really good for non-rosetta workloads.
Single-threaded (or "lightly threaded") absolutely. But if we're saying "desktop-comparable" and "heavy workloads" I'm gonna assume a multi-core workload and go throw things like the 5950X or 12900K into the ring at a minimum, and the 5995WX at the extreme. M1 ultra starts at $4k after all, it's absolutely fair to include Xeon-W & Threadripper Pros against that. M1's big cores punch above their weight, but they still can't make up that much of a core count deficit.
