Comment by adrian_b

I have not purchased any laptop recently so I do not know about what is true right now.

However, whenever in the past 20 years I bought a laptop, for a given amount of money there were always laptops with better quality than any Apple model.

Moreover, while the Apple computers are fine for the general population, there are also users like myself, for whom the Apple products lack adequate computational performance. My laptops typically used Intel Xeon/NVIDIA Quadro combos that were much faster than anything sold by Apple and 4k screens and very good keyboards. Apple has a poor reputation for keyboards.

If I bought a laptop right now I would probably choose something with Ryzen 395, which easily beats any Apple CPU for the things in which I am interested, like computations with big integers and FP64 array operations. The very good single-thread GeekBench results of the Apple CPUs are not at all representative of the CPU performance in other kinds of workloads, where the Intel/AMD ISA still provides features not yet available in the Arm-based CPUs.

Why many comments in this thread indicate that at least the consumer laptops made by Dell have a poor quality nowadays, I still have a rather old Dell Precision mobile workstation (sold with Linux) with excellent quality that no Apple laptop ever approached. Of course, such a mobile workstation has poor battery lifetime, incomparable with that of an Apple laptop, but for my needs this is a really minor inconvenient in comparison with its advantages.