I've been a diehard Thinkpad user for over a decade now (X201 my first back in 2010). Apple M2 Air is on another level despite not having a trackpoint. Just to add to your list: the aluminum shell feels nice too. Paired with the cpu it just never heats up, which used to be a drawback by acting as a big heat sink.

I love thinkpads, but after getting used to a mac trackpad I see why people always raved about it. That being said I do miss the trackpoint, and I like the old school t420 keyboard.

I'm really rooting for Asahi, but I'm not an advocate for desktop Linux. And I love Linux.

macOS really nails as much of making a consumer-facing operating system as I feel it's possible to get right without taking something else away. XProtect, GateKeeper, SIP and the enclave just feel like the optimal combination of methods to secure the machine while not overwhelming the user.

I wish it was possible as a power user to get more information from logs in the background to ensure everything is working as it should, but Eclectic Light Company have that covered quite well (https://eclecticlight.co/downloads/ if you want to check out their tools).

It's also kind of love/hate. There's a lot of locking down that happens - some it for genuine user protection (cool), some of which is to do with market competition (the whole Epic debacle).

Sometimes they change things that shouldn't be changed and I don't know why (the Settings screen on Ventura is horrid and makes it harder to see permissions settings). Then they announce end-to-end encryption for photos and iCloud and I'm back onboard.

It's also why I don't understand the Windows 11 hate. I run it on another machine and I'm loving it as a direction for Windows - more of the security apparatus runs in the background like macOS, but the information is still available to you as a power user. Mandating TPM2 is absolutely the right call (they have workarounds for non-TPM2 machines), and being able to have cryptographic trust roots down to the boot image is a massive user-friendly feature.

I wish there was a means by which Linux could have software certification so that malicious applications could have their certificates invalidated, but I get that as the FOSS community is decentralised there's a who-watches-the-watchmen question. Having a mechanism baked in at the kernel level could be useful to solve this if it allows me as a user to "subscribe" to an authority if I choose (i.e. if I'm using Ubuntu, I could choose to use a Canonical or Google whitelist for signed apps, or none at all, sort of analogous to how the web has had multiple certificate authorities for many years, except that I could freely choose my own authority for whitelisting if I wanted to).

I can't really compare anything to windows because (luckily) I don't have to use it.

I just wanted to try one of the new M1 machines, and was aware that MacOS has some unix/bsd roots that would make it feel a little familiar. After using it, it feels like a team of people made unix/bsd into a user friendly OS, even if it is more locked down than a linux distro.