My answer has to be differentiated: I use a MacBook Air with M1 at work_1, and Lenovo ThinkPads X1 at work_2 and at home, both running Ubuntu LTS.

The Mac wins regarding battery life (but deltas are shrinking) and - important when on the move - connecting with various WiFi SSDs (this can be quite critical).

The Linux ThinkPads win regarding keyboard quality, and hackability (as UNIX/Linux person, I prefer Linux' directory organization to MacOS', which is a mix of BSD and non-standard /proprietary stuff). I like than on my Linux boxes, any command is just there, whereas on the MacBook, 60% of the time I need a command not from the top-10, it's not there and I need to brew install it first, which sucks (this could be fixed by making a "distribution" of common commands for brew, I haven't even checked whether that exists).

Until recently, the Mac also won regarding weight, but now with the fantastic ThinkPad X1 Nano there's a high-quality high-mobility device with a great internal keyboard, good batteries and the weight of a feather that runs Ubuntu like a breeze.

So in the end, one ends up using the MacBook as an email/presentation machine and the Linux boxes (and, via ssh, servers of course) for technical work.

Ironically, the M1 in my MacBook doesn't get used for the machine learning research I do as that is all done on beefy (Linux) servers and/or GPU clusters. But it does improve the UI responsiveness.

PS: From my budget at work, I also got an iPad Pro (the lightest/smallest), and I was shocked how heavy it is. As a result, it hardly gets used apart from taking photos and scanning documents with its excellent camera. I was hoping to carry it to meetings, but I instead take the MacBook Air or X1 Nano along, both of which seem much lighter, esp. the latter (<970g). (I never use pens because I type faster than I hand-write and prefer my text to stay searchable; I understand results may look different for pen fans.)

> I need a command not from the top-10,it's not there and I need to brew install it first, which sucks (this could be fixed by making a "distribution" of common commands for brew, I haven't even checked whether that exists).

Run 'brew list' to see what you have installed, then write a shell/ansible script to install these.

Save script to your cloud storage/source control and anytime you get a new machine, run the script.

>I also got an iPad Pro (the lightest/smallest), and I was shocked how heavy it is

iPad pro isn't heavy.

Do you have a heavy case on it? As many cases can weigh the same as the iPad itself or more.