Gaming is a big one. Apple has now forced gaming companies twice to do work that is not necessary for a percent of their customer base. Thrice if you are picky.

Gaming is a big one. Apple has now forced gaming companies twice to do work that is not necessary for a percent of their customer base. Thrice if you are picky. The picky one is the death of Rosetta 1 Then they killed 32 bit binaries. This is the main reason the little Mac icon on steam is useless. Then Arm processors and yet another recompile that was probably more than a recompile. If you buy a windows machine, the last 30 or so years of gaming are available to you. And everything older can be emulated. For me personally, it's a few things I dislike. I do computer graphics for fun. I like using OpenGL and Vulkan because it's the most accessible both in terms of audience and material available. Apple doesn't support either (OpenGL is deprecated, Vulkan only available via translation layer). Additionally, and this is probably more problematic because I actually like Metal as an API, I don't live in the high income region of the US. I know I won't be happy with the default SSD. I know I want at least 16GB of RAM (can't run integration tests locally at work with 8). For a Windows laptop I go for 1TB SSD and 32GB RAM. But the added premium makes this really difficult. I'm in Germany so it's not like a Mac would eat up a year of my net wage but it's enough that I'd maybe rather go for the thinkpad. And if I actually tried to get a bit more beef in my GPU and by a larger model because I think the 13 inch are a bit small, I'd probably spend 3k or 3.5k. That's a maxed out gaming laptop. Really hard to justify the price. For my wife though? Base MBA all the way.