Build quality (aluminum), charging (magsafe), screen resolution, battery life, noise (or lack thereof), trackpad…
It’s like other vendors aren’t even trying.
Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
I always run Linux (Debian primarily) on my desktops and servers with a zealot-ish dedication, but what Mac and macOS brings to the table as a portable machine is irreplaceable with anything else.
Even a top end ThinkPad with a well groomed Linux distribution can't come close, sorry.
It seems that no other device makers are seeing the value in Apple's many-devices-acting-as-one approach. It makes for some serious vendor lock.
My both parents use linux and are happy with it. If you mostly use just the browser and reading e-mails, I don't see any better system even for someone who is non-technical.
Running an AMD card on my Dekstop system. It's invisible as an Intel on-board graphics card, and this is a great thing.
Much greater than rebooting to a black screen because NVIDIA decided to not support your GPU anymore because it finished its economic life for the company, not you.
If thats all you do you might as well just use macos. Something comes up you can just send your parents to the apple store. Probably one of the last places on earth you can get a real life human in a real life building from a real life major company to sit down with you and walk you through your issue. They will do this for free, you only pay for an actual repair job, which you can also of course do there for a relatively fair price all things considered for oem quality work. Not sure where I would take any other laptop for repair. Do people even repair laptops as a business?
Previously either VMware Workstation or Virtual Box.
Also I am not speaking from a position of no experience, as some projects require being assigned Mac Books, that I gladly return after delivery.
The good ThinkPads with Magnesium feel much better (both for hand and lap) and are lighter. And the expensive and complicated build allows maintenance (replacing a keyboard is a bless on the X13). Lenovo is just stupid and also allows to purchase low quality screens, low quality frames and even a Windows. A thing that Apple never allows, you cannot purchase a bad configuration.
The MBAs at Apple figured out much earlier, that a rigid metal frame is cheap and gives the impression of quality.
Aside from that?
Customers are guilty, wanting a shiny and quick solution. And governments and companies by following ultra rigid and outright stupid purchasing guide (ISO craziness and “we can drop Windows, we invested another 300.000 in a Windows only Application).
For example this dell is superb, has tandem oled with 200% scaling and runs linux (dhh runs this on onarchy)
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptop-computers/spd/xps14da...
It's not just privacy violations. Those are the tip of the iceberg. I used to open the Activity Monitor and see a couple pages of processes. Now it's in the hundreds.
It's stuff that was badly done even before AI. The industry has been drunk on SaaS for way too long, and with SaaS comes the junk/slop and the privacy violations.
I've been doing my part and cancelling all my subscriptions apart from power, water, internet and garbage.