I do not understand this rhetoric of Apple hardware being so amazing. The only moderately impressive thing they've done for years is the M chips. Beyond that, it's just crippled, overpriced, and unrepairable.
They have shiny cases, yay. I'll take my ugly Thinkpad and actually get shit done over a shiny case and glossy screen.
I think it's a bit more than that. I like that I can easily swap the SSD and DRAM in my Thinkpad. But Apple has definitely done some interesting things including:
- good thermals (especially vs. Thinkpad P series), even supporting fanless operation on the MacBook Air
- excellent microphone and speaker array (makes people much more intelligible on both sides during Zoom calls)
- excellent multitouch trackpad with good palm rejection (though for a trackpoint device Thinkpad is your best bet)
- unified GPU and CPU memory with up to 135 GB/s bandwidth (downside: DRAM is not upgradable)
- host-managed flash storage (downside: SSD is not upgradable)
And of course the 10-20 hour battery life is hard to beat. Only downside is I'll forget to plug in at all.
Historically, Apple has innovated quite a bit in the laptop space, including: moving the keyboard back for the modern palm rest design (PowerBook, 1991); active-matrix color display (PowerBook 180c, 1993); integrated wi-fi and handle antenna (iBook, 1999); Unix-based OS that could still run MS Office and Photoshop (Mac OS X, 2000 onward); full-featured thin metal laptop with gigabit ethernet (PowerBook G4 Titanium, 2001); pre-ultrabook thin laptop that fits in a manila envelope (MacBook Air, 2008); high-resolution display and all-flash storage in an ever-thinner design ("Retina" MacBook Pro, 2012); going all-in on USB-C/Thunderbolt and 5K external "retina" display (MacBook Pro, 2016); unprecedented performance, and a tandem OLED display with <10ms touch-to-pixel latency, in an absurdly thin iPad, which can also be used as a "laptop" (iPad M4 + magic keyboard, 2024); etc. Some of the innovations also failed, such as the touchbar, dual-controller trackpad, and "butterfly" keyboard which plagued the 2016 models.
I mean, having 2 hours of active use vs 10 hours is quite a bit of difference, quite a bit more meaningful than "shiny case".