I bought a laptop for about $600 with a GPU (RTX 3050).
The display... is not comparable. Sure, it's 144hz compared to the Mac's 60hz... but it's only 74% NTSC at 250 nits with 1080p, so the color accuracy and dim picture is distractingly bad.
And as for sleep, it's just useless. You close it with 70% at night and it's dead by morning. Supposedly the battery is the same size, but even when it's awake, the battery never makes it last more than ~2 hours. Also, that's two hours... when I'm not gaming, as I painfully learned when trying to download a Windows ISO. When I'm gaming, well, then it's shorter.
I might as well mention the thick, heavy, completely plastic construction. Feels like it will shatter from one drop. On the upside I managed to upgrade it from 8GB to 16GB... but then I'm wondering why this laptop even shipped with 8GB in the first place.
Ultimately though, it runs Windows with a basic GPU. Desktop Parametric CAD isn't coming to Mac anytime soon.
I was initially issued a Lenovo Thinkpad running Windows at my new job last year. I really liked my bottom-tier IBM Thinkpad back in the mid '00s (running a heavily-tuned Gentoo) and WSL exists so it's possible to do real work on a Windows machine without just using it to run a fullscreen Linux VM (... though WSL2 kinda is that) so I decided to give it a real chance.
I was working on getting issued a MacBook within a week. Right back to battery/outlet anxiety that I had escaped years and years ago by switching to Mac. Goddamn thing was losing over half its power over night. Six hours of useful time before you'll be hunting for an outlet at best from a full battery. WTF.
My MacBook that I've been using on battery almost three hours this morning and that hasn't been plugged in since about 5PM Friday is still over 70% charge. I didn't even think about or check the battery level when I opened it this morning, because there's no way it'd be a problem. Ahhh. Relaxing.
As a dissenting example, I got a 14" Lenovo Ideapad with a Ryzen 7 for $250 on Ebay. It's got a nice 1440p HDR display, a great iGPU for gaming at low-power, and an 8-core CPU.
If you want an ultrabook experience, get ultrabook hardware.
I use soldiworks on an M1 Pro 14" macbook pro under parallels and it's fine for professional work (including ~2000 part assemblies). Not fast but on par with my 2019 13" macbook pro and I've never been unable to do anything that I can do on my desktop.
The display... is not comparable. Sure, it's 144hz compared to the Mac's 60hz... but it's only 74% NTSC at 250 nits with 1080p, so the color accuracy and dim picture is distractingly bad.
And as for sleep, it's just useless. You close it with 70% at night and it's dead by morning. Supposedly the battery is the same size, but even when it's awake, the battery never makes it last more than ~2 hours. Also, that's two hours... when I'm not gaming, as I painfully learned when trying to download a Windows ISO. When I'm gaming, well, then it's shorter.
I might as well mention the thick, heavy, completely plastic construction. Feels like it will shatter from one drop. On the upside I managed to upgrade it from 8GB to 16GB... but then I'm wondering why this laptop even shipped with 8GB in the first place.
Ultimately though, it runs Windows with a basic GPU. Desktop Parametric CAD isn't coming to Mac anytime soon.