For desktop and server, sure. MacBook is superior for everything that matters in a laptop. The touchpad alone is a dream. compare that to constant pain for the thousands of hours I will use the device over it's lifetime.
Apple makes nice hardware, but it's definitely not superior for everything, and the gap between other manufacturers isn't really there anymore on the upper end.
So sure - the Macbook is better than a cheap ~$500 laptop. But between my work issued Macbook and my nice Dell XPS? Not much difference. In either price or hardware...
Honestly, even between the macbook and my framework - not enough of a difference to really be that upset about (my biggest complaint is mostly just battery life).
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Personally, I would argue that OS is a much bigger pain point to deal with, and you should probably factor that higher in the decision than the hardware. Just expect to spend roughly the same on the machine (Apple is still ~20% more)
And none of these are meaningfully different on high end laptops from other providers.
Apple had a window with M1 devices where I'd probably agree they were just better. Apple also has a history of making devices that are very expensive, and have a corresponding higher quality (ex - in the 2000s when most laptop manufacturers were racing to the bottom, and things like the Eee pc were considered hot - lots of garbage quality windows machines).
But many manufacturers today have entries in the "High quality, high price" category, and they're very similar.
The size is almost identical to an M5 laptop, the battery life is almost identical to an M5 laptop, the touchpad is almost identical to an M5 laptop (personally, I actually like the touchpad on the xps slightly more because the cutout on the front of macbooks is sharp, and I find it annoying and painful for long use, but I also have very large hands and I'm left handed).
And also - the price is functionally the same as the new M5 laptops.
All of those land in the +/- 10% range of each other. With just slight differences (ex - I can get a touchscreen on the XPS if I want, but it makes the battery life 15hrs instead of 18hrs on the macbook. The XPS is also fractionally lighter (3lbs vs 3.4lbs). The macbook is ~10% faster on single core benchmarks then the intel series 3, but identical to slightly worse on multicore. etc...)
Basically - unless you're actually using different machines here... stop it, you're talking out your ass (cough - fanboy - cough).
Even the framework... yes - it's clearly not as "good" as the $3600 macbook I have. I don't expect it to be given I paid ~$1500 for it. But it also excels in other areas that make it worth considering - I have 3 young kids, and I've had the screen pulled flat several times, the touchpad got a cup of milk dumped in it, and my oldest shoved a screwdriver into a usb-c port. Turns out new screen hinges were ~$19, the touchpad was ~$21, and the replacement port was $9. All done at home myself with simple tools.
Compared to several trips to a store and weeks without a laptop... that's a type of ergonomics that I prefer right now.
Eh, it depends on how you use it. I have a heavily used Linux laptop that's almost a decade old and I still love it.
I've had various work and personal MacBooks over the years and don't really miss them. It sounds like their quality has gotten somewhat better in recent cycles but the era of keyboards so fragile they break if you sneeze on them, and gimmicks like turning part of the keyboard into a touch screen were terrible. I would absolutely take a Linux machine from that era that costs half as much over any of those devices.
One caveat is that there are Apple-specific features like some of the trackpad gestures that I've never been a heavy user of. Partly because they aren't that interesting to me, and partly because I don't like having my workflows and muscle memory tied to a specific platform I don't control. Someone heavily into those features might have a harder time switching away.
How is that touchpad better than any other? My wife has Macbook Air, I don't see any difference between touchpad on my linux Dell 5680 compared to the Macbook.
It sounds similar to people that praise "haptic feedback" on phones, and describe feedback on some devices as extraordinary. (vibration device, seriously?)
Macbook has nice hardware, if I can ignore the strange keyboard layout, although I would prefer bigger keyboard and smaller touchpad.
Macbook software is something that is so bad compared to linux that I won't even comment.
Glad to see I am not the only one. Many years ago I had a laptop with a pointing stick, aka "the clit", and that was surprisingly easy to use. But touchpads? No matter how fancy and expensive you make them, they will always be a bad interface.
Haptic feedback touchpad is vastly superior to the button style. Less force required makes it easier to move your finger while the "button" is pressed. Most higher end laptops use it as the standard touchpad these days. MacOS is also well optimized for touchpads to the point that the traditional mouse experience is somewhat degraded. The smoothness and interactivity of the animations in response to touchpad gestures give a powerful placebo effect for how good the hardware is.
Multiple other competitive laptops have haptic trackpads with the list growing every year.
Lenovo and Framework have great ones, so does Microsoft and other brands I can’t think of right now.
I also find it that “macOS is well-optimized for touchpads” actually means “macOS is hostile to traditional mice and keyboards so that Apple can sell you external mice that cost 3x the price of alternatives even though you’re using your laptop at a stationary desk with external monitor 80% of the time”.
Plug in a traditional mouse to macOS and you’ll see how horrible the OS is with it for no reason. I needed third party mouse software just to play Minecraft without a horrendous scroll wheel experience for the item bar. There’s no built-in OS setting to have separate scroll directions for trackpad versus external mouse even though such a setup is highly logical. You need third party software for that. Meanwhile, on Linux that configuration option is built-in to Gnome and KDE.
Most trackpad gestures in macOS don’t need to be trackpad gestures at all and seem to be aimed at selling expensive peripherals and making Apple’s trackpad advantage larger than it would be if their system used a different OS. There’s no advantage to three finger swiping versus a traditional keyboard shortcut (to be fair, macOS also offers the keyboard shortcuts).
With the exception of flying on an airplane, grabbing a $30 mouse out of your backpack and plopping it on the table is perfectly acceptable and portable solution and often better than any trackpad imaginable for deep productive work.
Anyway, that last bit is a tangent and a rant of mine, but either way, the list of reasons to prefer a Mac is shrinking every day, if you ask me.
For example, MacBook Pros aren’t at the top of the battery life charts anymore, that honor goes to the Framework 13 Pro with the Panther Lake chips.
Unfortunately, not to my knowledge. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get a retail partner soon, though. Surely they must realize that Micro Center would be an ideal partner for their demographic.
I own the original chassis 13, AMD 7640U. My previous laptop was a MacBook Pro M2 14”.
There are some clear downgrades: battery life, screen, speakers. Processing power, yeah, though it’s not like I ever maxed out the one I had.
I love having ample storage though. 2TB/32GB in a MacBook Pro was wildly out of my price range. Back in the good old days of early 2025 buying those components yourself was something like a $200-300 cost while the Mac was closer to a thousand bucks. The keyboard is superior to a MacBook Pro in my eyes. I also started to really, really despise the notch and the way the menu bar software fights it.
My Framework 13 Pro arrives tomorrow. It appears like it should address every complaint I have on my original 13”. It’s just too bad about the RAM situation otherwise LPCAMM2 would be a benefit rather than something of a detractor like it is today. I’m one of the lucky people who snagged an old stock 32GB module for $250 during the announcement keynote. You’re almost better off with soldered memory in the current situation, but hopefully that’s temporary.
It’s a dream with Linux compatibility, as you’d expect. I enjoy the fact that I can play real games on Steam compared to the macOS situation where gaming was always a pain. There are also a lot of things I like about CachyOS and KDE a lot better than macOS. In a lot of ways it’s freeing, but some commercial software is obviously missing.
