Were you 3x as productive though? That's the analysis "they" tend to be doing.

I don't even use windows (beyond gaming). The Jedi and I are just off on the ends of the bell curve pointing and the stupid numbers on the stupid price tag.

I mean... it really doesn't matter.

There are only a couple of relatively niche spaces where things like cpu performance are really the bottleneck right now.

Hell - RPi 5 is perfectly fine for a huge range of development tasks. The 8gb version is very reasonable $125.

Can you find things that these boxes can't do? Absolutely. Do most developers do those things? ehhhh probably not. Especially not in the webdev space.

Would I still pick a nice machine if given the chance? Sure, I have cash to burn and I like having nice laptops (although not Apple...).

But part of the "AI craze" is that hardware genuinely is commoditized, and manufacturers really, REALLY wanted a new differentiating factor to sell people more laptops. There's not much reason to upgrade, especially if the old machine was a decent machine at time of purchase.

I have 8 year old dell XPS laptops that do just fine for modern dev.

> Depends. Are you doing dev on Microsoft's stack, or are you doing dev on all of the other stacks?

You can run docker in WSL better than you can on a Mac. You can run Linux natively on that box, too. "Stacks" is sort of ambiguous (my world is embedded junk, and the answer for using a mac with these oddball USB flashers and whatnot is pretty much "Just No, LOL"), but to claim that the mac is more broadly capable in these spaces when it is clearly less is.... odd.

Macs are popular among the SV set, so macs are strong in whatever the SV set thinks is important (thus "I bought a Mac Mini for OpenClaw!"). And everything else runs on $350 windows garbage.

I'm comparing it to my M2 laptop, but in practice the 9955HX is substantially faster than even the M4 Pro I have in my Mac Mini, about 30%~ or so in wall clock time for Rust compilation.

As much as this saddens me I think its because most computer users these days never think about files. Everything we do on a day to day basis exists as database records, either in sqlite databases hidden away in application data directories, or in the databases behind a million SaaS products. Music is done in Apple Music, photos are managed in iPhoto, and so and so forth.

In which way are other GUI “finder-equivalents” better? I’m not invested either way, but I’m quite curious. It would be a great biz opportunity to make an aftermarket replacement if there is huge gap.

Like 5. Literally 5, total.

The amount of people that know how to and also want to replace their operating system is effectively a rounding error in the consumer electronic market in general.