For some perspective, this is to some extent happening with all review categories everywhere. There's often no "best X", but "best X for A" and "best X for B".

For some perspective, this is to some extent happening with all review categories everywhere. There's often no "best X", but "best X for A" and "best X for B". It happens for many review sites now, with kitchen tools and towels and everything (here's one for olive oil dispensers, just as an example: https://www.saveur.com/shop/best-olive-oil-dispensers/ https://www.saveur.com/shop/best-olive-oil-dispensers/). My guess is this is responding to reasonable concerns that there might be "no best X". The cynic in me wonders if it's driven by an avoidance of advertising dollar losses but I don't think that's all of it. They also explain right in the review why someone might not want a MacBook: "MacBooks are even more expensive than Windows ultrabooks, especially if you want to upgrade the memory or storage; Apple’s SSD upgrade prices are so high that we usually recommend looking into cloud storage or an external SSD instead. And as with Windows ultrabooks, our recommended MacBook configuration for most people lacks the processing power to play demanding games." If you look at the prices too, they say at the time of publication the XPS and Air were about the same price. People do complain about the price of upgrading the MacBooks from base, so that's not just Wirecutter. Some people just don't want Macs, or can't have them for IT reasons. It's not about the hardware, but all the network effects that goes with it. Wirecutter is trying to avoid that debate. I own a MacBook (I'm typing from one right now), and almost certainly will buy another one soon. I also don't think I'd go to Wirecutter to make a decision about a laptop. But I think they're catering to a certain audience that treats laptops like they do a coffee maker, and I think they're not completely unreasonable in structuring things that way.