the whole pc laptop industry really is an embarrassment right now. It has been 5 years since the M1 Macbook release, and there is no real equivalent. I'm on a thinkpad x9, which might be the closest I've seen, but the cpu performance just isn't as good.
Vizio made a good laptop once and then they just existed the computer industry. They had a vision of high quality approachable laptops, desktops and pro platforms and their first gen was a good attempt, but they just didn’t follow on.
I think it was fine 20 odd years ago. I had a Thinkpad T41p in 2004 and it was a great laptop. Even my Sony Vaio Z was nice in 2008 compared to the competition (although it had serious issues with the screen flexibility causing it to fail multiple times).
Since 2012 I've had 3 Macs, a 2012 Air, a 2020 M1 (this was a massive upgrade and the nicest laptop I ever used, even compared to my relatively new work thinkpad). I just cracked the screen on my M1 so bought a discounted M4 air on black friday. I can't tell the difference other than I like having magsafe back and only miss the touch bar slightly.
Yes! I had a Vizio laptop (the thin one ala a macbook air) and it was absolutely fantastic, probably the best PC laptop I have ever had. It was lightweight, powerful, had a good screen (for the time) plus some things that few other laptops had at the time, like a TPM.
The gaming laptops that have been made a bit less game-y without the RGBs and thick chassis turned out to be the sweet spot for me. Some compromises here and there, sure, but they mostly have the hardware I want. Asus has a good line up that works very well with Linux from 13 to 16 inches, all with dGPUs, AMD CPU (though Intel is also there), high-refresh rate OLEDs etc.
The tablet itself has been good. The firmware support is good. The charger died, and the keyboard case is on its last legs. I had to solder the pins back on to keep it working. It's an acceptable keyboard case, but the 'a' key doesn't work super well. Still a decent product, particularly for a Linux convertable, but definitely not something I would give my dad.
XPS 13 has snapdragon x elite and is very well built. Not sure how good Linux support is, tho. I run Linux on my Intel-based XPS 14 and it's pretty good, apart from the webcam being totally uncalibrated and looking kinda shite, but at least it works.
Maximum 32GB of RAM, which is a bad joke if you want to use it as developer system nowadays.
TL;DR: Waited for a decade for somebody to make a non-shitty notebook, went for macbook as the least bad option when the old one was falling apart.
Also the modern thinkpad keyboards are crap, and the trackpoint is unusable in the low profile style.
I switched to a macbook pro last year after having some contact with apple hardware in a customer project, from a thinkpad x230 with a x220 keyboard I've kept barely alive over the years. Now _some_ non-Apple notebooks (mostly from framework) can take sensible amount of memory, but at the time of purchase that was the only 14" notebook capable of taking a decent amount of RAM. The only other ones that could take RAM were some xeon workstation type builds - big display, shitty battery runtime, and same or more expensive than a fully specced out macbook.
Apple also seems to have put some effort into keyboards - with the current macbook pro keyboard being one of the best notebook keyboards currently out there. Not as good as the classic thinkpad keyboards, but better than anything lenovo made in over a decade. Dell never was that great, and did a massive step back in their latest model. HP is somewhat close, but still noticeable difference.
Since I switched to a macbook from a (proper) thinkpad I just carry a trackball with me when I expect to do longer stuff that requires mousing - the track pad isn't bad, but gets annoying over time. That also finalized my switch away from mice - before that I had both a mouse and a trackball on my desk, and while I still have that I can't remember when I last touched the mouse.
I suspect it does not work well outside Apple world. And that's kind of the thing with "I want Apple hardware but with Linux software": Software is actually important in the user experience with the hardware.
I don't know about the magic trackpad specifically, but on my HP Elitebook I can use gestures. I'm running i3 and it doesn't support much out of the box, but I was able to configure stuff using libinput-gestures.
> "the whole pc laptop industry really is an embarrassment right now. It has been 5 years since the M1 Macbook release, and there is no real equivalent."
True. I think that's mostly because they model their merchandise after Apple's products. I find Apple's hardware utterly undesirable, tho. The only product of theirs I ever showed any interest in was their Newton line of handhelds; my dream machine is quite far removed from the stuff that's mentioned in the OP's article, let alone anything that maps to Apple's portfolio (and even more importantly, product philosophy).
