It’s definitely not for free. You can buy several Windows laptops and Office licenses for a single Mac laptop.
While that’s true, most windows laptops of similar build quality and form factor are around the same price. Windows also advertises to you and installs unwanted apps on your computer without modifications. Of course, you could always install Linux.
Of course if you install Linux on most big brand machines you’ll have problems with drivers etc, so it’s not as easy a solution as one would hope.
That’s nowhere near as true as it once was. Most of your big well-supoorted distros run flawlessly on most big brand machines.
Where you’ll run into problems is in using more obscure distros that require a lot of tweaking and customization, but something like Ubuntu should run beautifully out of the box and if it does have a problem it will be very well-known and heavily documented with easy to follow step by step instructions on fixing it. Linux just isn’t the pain in the ass it used to be. Or at least it doesn’t have to be.
Big brands like Lenovo, Dell, Intel work with Ubuntu pretty fine, there are compatibility tests for distros. I blind installed openSuse (after running Ubuntu beside W11) on my Lenovo Yoga from 2020 without issue aside from fingerprint scanner. All my NUCs have been great on Linux.
None that offer similar quality across the board in display, speakers, input devices, performance, battery life. Trust me I’ve looked. Alternative laptops aren’t really any cheaper any more unless you get something of significantly lesser quality, in which case there’s nothing surprising about that - something worse is cheaper.
Isn’t apple consistently removing ports on their newer products? I thought that was a common complaint.
It’s genuinely been ages since i’ve heard anyone try to defend the pricing of apple products for anything other than luxury purchases or rich people products. They’re vastly overpriced and underpowered, and they’re locked into the apple ecosystem. If you aren’t buying apple products for everything, suddenly a lot of shit doesn’t “just work” anymore lmao