Actually, this is the wrong comparison (at least for me). I went from a 2017 15" MBP that was around 3.5k EUR to a ThinkPad T495 (with AMD hardware) for around

Actually, this is the wrong comparison (at least for me). I went from a 2017 15" MBP that was around 3.5k EUR to a ThinkPad T495 (with AMD hardware) for around 1k EUR and I also maxed out the RAM to 32GB for another EUR 150. I couldn't be happier. You mention the worse touch pad, and I agree, it took me a week to adjust... but on the other hand, the keyboard of the ThinkPad is so much better, in fact it might be the best keyboard I have ever used (not only on a laptop, and I have used mechanical keyboards). Also, KDE/Kubuntu seems to have progressed so far over the past 10 years (since I used it last) that it feels better than Mac OS to me currently. The only pain point remains my photography workflow, which I still haven't migrated and for that I still use the MBP... If I manage to migrate that, I don't think I'm going back to the Apple ecosystem soon. Currently I feel much more productive at my programming workflow than with the MBP. Doing mostly TypeScript, OCaml and Rust development. And that for about 1/3 of the cost.