HP have a better webcam (Higher res and better colours), Z Book and Framework have the same keyboard basically, the software is no where near as good (far more locked down), considering M series have been out for 5 and many had very speedy failures I doubt 8-10 years especially for the base models on low ram. Multicore scores (so for any form of simulation or parallel computing) work M series are not even in the conversation in comparison with the latest AMD and Intel. Another key issue is due to architecture change, their reusability once they become unusable in their current form means its Asahi or nothing.

Repairability is non existant, a battery and some ports is not anything to shout about.

I have used Macs since the early 90's when they were repairable, pretty much consistently and I still have to on occassion but they have dropped the ball on every aspect. From the late 90's repairability and innovation have gone downhill. The late 00's to the early 10's brought it back and ever since then bar the odd thing that is pretty but less practical, just look at the touch bar and the removal of ports.

I have had Thinkpads, ZBooks, and other laptops such as Lets Note easily as long as a macbook and yes some of the pretty may be missing but that isn't what I focus on in devices.

"Basically the same keyboard" but the Mac one has light comming only trough letters on keycaps, while my HP zbook is leaking more light around them, even worse when viewed from an angle.

Speedy failures of several tousand units when they are selling millions. + having it repaired is not a dreadful experience as with other PC makers (have horrendous experiences with HP, Asus and LG).

Multiscore? Sure, the laptop that sounds overshadows my robot vacuum can do slightly more work in a short timespan, id rather not have to deal with uncomnfortable temperatures when its just sitting on a desktop, doing who knows what (probably not indexing my files, as the search function just have no idea the file I opened 20x in the last 2 weeks exists). Which bring us to software: is it more closed and do I hate it for it? Sure. Is it worse overall? Not a chance.

Repairability is "bring it to an applestore and possibly come out with a new device right away, or wait a week. Miles ahead than any other brand. Sure, you can change the battery yourself, but you either get shafted for oem battery, or wonder why that cheap battery from shady shop runs just as bad as your old one. What good is repairing 5 year old HP thats breaking apart, overheating at idle, with screen burning out, hinges having a play, with speakers of a joke quality, with so many bad memories, when you can have non-repaired 10 year old macbook and it still feel like new.

For work I have windows machine because I need to use windows apps, but at home I am m1 macbook air (costing less than 1/4 of my zbook workstation), and apart from raw power its better in every. single. way.

Considering that my 17 year old MacBook only needed a new battery in the process, I can say that they're dependable machines (also ~20 Macs around me confirms this little statistic of mine).

On the simulation performance, you came to the right place, because I'll be developing a BEM code for material simulation. I can test it on both M series and on a cluster and see how big the gap is. Intel based Macs were pretty on par with their server siblings. I expect to be able extract similar performance from M based systems with some tight coding.

If you believe that Asahi's changes won't distilled to mainstream Linux, you're mistaken. Marcan might have fought with the kernel devs, but somebody will carry these changes in another form sooner or later. Macs wont't be Asahi or MacOS only systems for long. I think you can understand this better than me, because as far as I understand, we're using these things called computers for a similar amount of time.

BTW, you're citing Thinkpads and Z-Books which are the two machine classes which can claim some parity with MacBooks. They are the same class machines basically, so you have some bias in your views. This is what I cited as "I have to beg the local distributors to...". So getting an equivalent Z-Book or Thinkpad is not 10x harder, but at least 3x more expensive for a similar configuration.