> But you can find decent hardware elsewhere, even at lower cost and with better configurability.

The problem is, you pay the same price for a Thinkpad/Elitebook and you get ridiculous gotchas like missing wireless antennas (at most you can find 2x2, if you're lucky). Or the configuration you like doesn't come to your country, or the vendor doesn't allow custom configuration for your country unless you buy 10+, etc.

OTOH, I pay the premium, I get what I configured, with top notch small specs (antennas, wireless chips, etc.). You can't find a spare 40mm SSD for your Elitebook after three years, but Apple will service your device happily.

If you get the said SSD from the vendor, its quadruple the price, so it's Apple's price territory again.

At that price range, there's no advantage in hardware prices between Apple, HP, Lenovo and Dell. They're equally cheap/expensive. So, IMHO, you pay less on the long run for an Apple laptop, which you can use for 7-8 years without problems.

Maybe so. Anyway, talking about Apple's hardware specs completely misses the point that started this entire subthread.

I’m not sure this is true? The $1000 version has absolutely ridiculous performance for it’s price class. To the point it’s nearly as good as my desktop system.

My desktop system is a 24-core Zen 2. The M1 shouldn't be faster, and I'm certain the difference is almost purely a matter of software, but in reality the M1 certainly feels a lot faster.

Yes, the desktop has higher throughput. Of course it does. But that doesn't mean I don't feel a fraction of a second's lag whenever I do basically anything, and on the M1 that just... doesn't exist.

FWIW in a benchmark of a lua parser my friend is writing my M1 beat my 5950X Ryzen by a factor of 2x. According to him the L1/L2 cache makes the difference.

So it's not just a matter of feel.

On the other hand, my i7 16 inch MacBook Pro consists of purely lag. Half of the time it’ll be the ‘kernel process’ so I don’t even have a clue what’s causing it.

If we are talking about ARM64 devices specifically, the prices of the new M1 products are actually very competitive.