They’re about 1-1.5 generations ahead of AMDs mobile offering, and OEMs have sweetheart deals with Intel, which is more like 4-5 generations behind.
So flagship business laptops (which are the only comparable laptops in terms of build quality to Macbooks) are hamstrung, and everything else is built like a matchbox even with AMD cpus.
It's everything else where MacBooks excel too. The build quality is insane, I've never seen a laptop with as little flex as a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The keyboards are now finally great, and the display is amazing as well. Trackpad is best in class too.
Another thing: the displays are glossy, but still not very reflective. The Windows laptops glossy displays are so much more reflective, they are unusable outside. Also something worth mentioning, the MacBook displays get really bright. A high-end OLED display hardly goes above 400 nits. A MacBook Pro can go to 600 nits and outside it goes to 1600 nits. This is the difference between being able to use a laptop outside, and not.
Durability: if you're not doing anything crazy the MacBook will look brand new even after years of usage. Notable exception is the cheap plastic key caps which degrade very quickly, a bummer.
So the MacBooks beat the competition easily from a hardware quality perspective, and we haven't even talked about the elephant in the room yet: CPU performance, battery life and fan noise, obviously Apple is even further ahead in this area.
And then price, as strange as it sounds, both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are cheaper than the competition.
Disclaimer: I don't own a MacBook personally because I think macOS is not great, but that's probably the only reason why I'm not buying a MacBook. I would happily pay same the price of a MacBook Pro for a similar Windows laptop if it existed. It does not. There are always compromises.
That’s a factor, but I’d still rather have an M1 MacBook Air than any other laptop with a comparable form factor. Surely AMD and Intel can offer something that’s at least able to compete with an M1 in terms of performance per Watt. But Apple’s competitors are just nowhere near offering a comparable product.
no, and even if they did, the way they operate is “thermal and power headroom is free performance gains!” - which is a sucky philosophy with laptops, as they get hot and lose battery much quicker than they need to by constantly boosting.
They’re about 1-1.5 generations ahead of AMDs mobile offering, and OEMs have sweetheart deals with Intel, which is more like 4-5 generations behind.
So flagship business laptops (which are the only comparable laptops in terms of build quality to Macbooks) are hamstrung, and everything else is built like a matchbox even with AMD cpus.