I've moved completely to EliteBooks and am very happy with my decision. The build quality is superb, they're upgradeable, everything is replaceable and there's an excellent market and after market for parts, and HP has codepaths in their firmware for Linux support, meaning even Modern Standby works well.
Price points for refurb and used hardware are great, too.
The key qualities of something like a macbook air are:
It has no fans.
It's temperature never changes unless you really push it. I've never used any other laptop where I could feel at least some warmth when it was turned on.
My m1 air still has enough battery to run for a full day of usage, here several years after I bought it. Basically never loses power while the lid is closed either, but that is less of an issue.
This is indeed a problem. My Macbook Pro (with active cooling!) would commonly come within 5c of junction temp when compiling, mdworker_shared was running, or Docker was working.
It was an issue with the Intel Macs too, just much more readily apparent since they throttled faster. I wish Apple backed down from this hill, for the sake of my damned gonads.
My m1 air with 8gb of ram has been doing docker and all my golang, C/Zig and Python work without issues so far. If I were to sell it, I'd probably grade the keyboard and mousepad (the clicking) 5/10 now. Not sure if it's because I've been a little rough with it (I have small children who sometimes kick the keyboard etc) or if the quality is lower than it was back when I had my 201(5 or 6) macbook pro which was frankly in a condition as good as new when I switched to this one.
It throttes and stuff, but it still outperforms the t14 i7 with 32gb ram I've got from my company. Granted, that one has a lot of enterprice stuff running, but still...
I do hope someone will make a pc that is as close to an air as possible though. I like Apple, but I'm not a fan of being bound to an US tech company these days. I'm not important enough to be targeted personally, but what if the US government decides to ban all Danes from US tech in the war for Greenland? Or the more likely scenario, what if Apple decides to go full Microsoft with AI and what not?
But they’re heavier, slower, have more impactful active cooling, have much worse battery life (mostly due to the processor), and have some lower quality user interface components. Don’t get me wrong they’re decent hardware! It’s just the macbook air benchmark is very high.
I've moved completely to EliteBooks and am very happy with my decision. The build quality is superb, they're upgradeable, everything is replaceable and there's an excellent market and after market for parts, and HP has codepaths in their firmware for Linux support, meaning even Modern Standby works well.
Price points for refurb and used hardware are great, too.
[1] https://ubuntu.com/certified