It may not be worth it: the ridiculous upfront prices to get enough RAM and SSD space, and the lack of upgradeability of those two components, significantly undermine the value proposition of the Mac platform.
But the laptops at least are definitely better quality. The touchpad, charger, screen, keyboard, case, speakers, etc. are all well above the Windows competition in terms of both build quality and durability. The commoditization of every component in a PC laptop has really sapped the life of that platform. No, actually, I don't want another shitty Synaptics touchpad with ancient features and buggy drivers. I really would like every key on my keyboard to still work consistently 2 years after I bought the computer. And no 1080p is not good enough (but hey at least we finally got away from 1366x768!).
Some of the PC makers do seem to have caught on and you can get something comparably specced and competitively priced if you look hard and carefully. But it will still have some deficiencies compared to the MacBook that you can't shop your way around.
> Some of the PC makers do seem to have caught on and you can get something comparably specced and competitively priced if you look hard and carefully. But it will still have some deficiencies compared to the MacBook that you can't shop your way around.
This has kept me on Mac laptops as well. There's always some compromise made elsewhere, even on high end laptops. Usually it's the trackpad, or poor thermals making it unusable as a laptop or just super loud (comparing to the Apple Silicon line here, my intel MBPs were furnaces). Plus, if you want anything other than a 1080p screen you are pushing close to MBP prices anyway.
>I really would like every key on my keyboard to still work consistently 2 years after I bought the computer.
You say this as if Apple didn't spend 5 years selling keyboards that were nearly guaranteed to die after a years worth of usage in a slightly dusty environment.
People love Apple hardware because they have a terrible memory for all the flawed hardware Apple always releases and pretends isn't flawed. There are significant design flaws that affect a significant portion of their customers that they just never acknowledge. For example, I only recently learned that my previous work macbook failed in the way it did because a specific short ribbon cable was made shorter for no discernible reason and so some revisions of the 2015 macbook pro just have indescribable screen corruption as a failure mode. Apple doesn't tell you that though, just send it in, let us charge you $1500, and replace half of the computer.
"Better" is a relative term. Better in what, for which purpose?
There is currently no fanless laptop that can run linux (at least macos is not windows, so good enough for me, I do have some standards) that can even remotely be compared to a macbook air. Or in general to meet the quitness of higher end macbooks except under heavy load, or the performance you get on the go. I am just tired of having a "jet engine" making constant noise in my room. We have been waiting for qualcomm snapdragons to catch up, maybe after a few more iterations they will stop being a disappointment, and then I may switch to a snapdragon (or amd or intel or whoever manages to get there) laptop with linux.
This does not even include other aspects that macbooks are superior to whatever I have used in the past, eg their touchpads or speakers, which I discovered just when I switched.
I still use a MacBook from 2015. That's hella longevity compared to other laptops I've owned. And the only thing better than Apple trackpads is the Thinkpad "nub".
Too bad about the craptastic keyboards from 2016-2020 though.