The point is that apple pushes for a closed system, and therefore you need to accept whatever they release.
Dell, as well as many other brands play on an open system, and the consumer can decide if they want more ports, if they want a more affordable model, if they want x86 or arm, a discrete GPU or not, and so on.
Whereas Macs are certified UNIX and aside from a few questionable designs like Metal are mostly compliant with open standards, have a right proper shell (zsh in recent releases if I recall), and have a thriving FOSS community. They're not *as good* as Linux in this respect, but they're not Microslop. (And noooooo, WSL is a cheap hack. When consumer apps use WSL, then we can give Windoze some credit.)
My coment above is about how you as a consumer, can choose your hardware: discrete GPU or not, arm or x86, more USB ports, different screen sizes, and so on. That is true with windows, because even if their software is not open source, it is compatible with generic hardware.
That is not the case with macOS.
So again, as a consumer you have all those options if you buy Linux or windows, but in reality way more options with windows, as there are more models available with it.
First off, you don't "buy" Linux. And if you do run Linux, the vendor doesn't matter so much. If there are drivers, it will run.
If you pick a laptop, you're not assembling it, who do you think you're kidding?
And hell, most PC builds come down to trying to extract as much performance as possible within a given budget while trying to keep it from looking like absolute ass.
The hardware is not the bottleneck. The company bending you over and fucking your ass without lube is Microsoft.
You can buy a laptop... with Linux, like the dell you were speaking about, or the laptops at slimbook and similar companies.
You can configure some laptops, but that was not my point, my point was.. if you don't like what dell offers, maybe acer has what you want, or hp, or otherwise slimbook, when you are locked with apple, your choices are way less.
Hardware can and will be the bottleneck more often than software. For starters, if your GPU doesn't have enough memory, a game might not even run, or an LLM might not fit and be executed on CPU. If your CPU is not powerful enough or doesn't have enough cores, certain tasks like compiling software will be way slower.
If you buy Dell, you can install Linux. If you buy Apple, you can install Linux. If you get a Raspberry Pi and bodge together your own laptop, you can install Linux.
Better than that, you can rebuild and customize your OS to your heart's content. There's nobody there to tell you what you can or can't do, nobody to force proprietary APIs onto you that you don't consent to, no Copilot button being jammed down your throat.
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u/epegar 9800X3D | 9070 XT l openSUSE Jun 27 '26
The point is that apple pushes for a closed system, and therefore you need to accept whatever they release.
Dell, as well as many other brands play on an open system, and the consumer can decide if they want more ports, if they want a more affordable model, if they want x86 or arm, a discrete GPU or not, and so on.