Originally Posted by
Dread Pirate Jeff
Prior to my MacBooks, my work laptop was an Alienware M15x. It weighed about 11 pounds which I carried around the world and yes, that got to be quite heavy (I was done carrying it around about an hour into my first trip with it). By comparison, the 2013 13" MBA weighed in at 2.96 lbs (1.35 kg), while the 2019 15" MBP weighs in at 4.02 pounds (1.83 kg) and the 13" at 3.02 pounds (1.37 kg). My Air was a late 2011 11" MBA that weighed in at 2.38 pounds (1.08 kg).
People (the usuals) made the usual comments about "the cult of Mac" and "fanbois" and such but that is what they have to do to justify replacing a laptop every couple years because it becomes so horribly out of date, or just falls apart because it's made cheaply. I averaged a new Windows laptop about every 2 years, myself, while I've owned 2 Macs in the last 11 years, a 2011 MBA and a 2019 MBP, the MBA is still in use elsewhere in my family, albeit on it's second battery, and the MBP will probably viable untl after 2030 at least.
That said, I'll probably replace it next year when the M2 MBPs come out because the M1s are quite a performance improvement over the Intel MBPs and I could justify an early replacement for that much of a performance bump.
The problem is there is a lot of cheap, garbage hardware out there in the PC universe. Especially on the consumer side. Pretty much everything that goes on sale for Black Friday or the rest of the holiday season is crap. 95% of what you can buy off the shelf at Best Buy is crap.
Buy crap hardware and then yeah you’re gonna have to replace it in short order. There are plenty of other examples of PCs with lives as long as or even longer than Macs. Primarily business laptops… with ThinkPads being a prime example. I still have Dells, HPs, and ThinkPads from the late 2000’s and all are running great with some RAM and SSD. All the consumer-grade Dells, HPs, Toshibas, and Sonys physically fell apart or had fatal hardware failures. Units from these lines, particularly ones with upgradeable storage and memory, can offer superior longevity compared to Macs with increasingly soldered components.
I will also concede that Windows laptops tend to require a reformat/reinstall of the OS more frequently than Macs. For me that’s no big deal because I separate OS from storage, so I can reformat in an afternoon every couple years. But that’s beyond a lot of people, and they confuse a computer needing an OS reinstall with needing a new machine when really the hardware has a lot of mileage left.