I am a kind of laptop addict. I sell and purchase laptops every 6 months or so. I've tried everything on the Windows side, and have had the most beautiful machines in my possession, but they all had some critical flaw that made me look at my work laptop (Macbook Pro M1) and think... "I get it"
They currently have a monopoly on the best computing experience, that's why it costs so much. The developer experience is 10 times better than Windows, but it's doesn't suffer the lack of software support that Linux does. It has the best battery life BY FAR of any laptop, which is important to people like myself who find themselves working on trains and planes. And the overall build quality and performance is so good that it can be resold 5 years later for 75% of the original price.
This has to be some kind of joke, right? I have an M1 macbook through my job and it is absolutely horrible. For starters, the file system is absolutely horrible and "dumbed down" and requires you to learn special button-combinations to even find files, the UI in general is "form over function" times 100, and ooooh the horror of not having snappable windows. Also the fan is horribly loud and is often at 100% due to the terrible thermals. Sounds like a jet engine.
I've had it for over 2 years now and use it daily but it still feels like I have to battle and force it to be able to do what I want. The trackpad is nice though!
I have not heard the fans once in over a year of heavy use, I'm starting to doubt they exist. Fan noise is a far more prevalent issue with Windows machines so I'm very curious to know how you've managed to convince the fans to spin up at all, let alone at a high volume.
No window snapping is a glaring omission, but easily resolved with a 3rd party app.
Fortunately as a programmer I hardly use Finder, but yes it's not very intuitive.
I could list fifty problems each with Windows, Mac OS and Linux, but am comfortable enough with all of them because I adapt to their weaknesses (the ones that can be adapted to anyways).
Also a programmer :) I still wanna be able to actually browse my file system with a GUI at times. I don't think "oh but you could just use the terminal" is an acceptable solution to such a monumental part of an OS
Dunno how you manage that with the fans. Everyone where I work has the same complaint. It was even worse at my old job that used the intel macbook pros that were before the m1, the fan was even louder and would always stick to 100% after a while, like it couldn't adjust itself and just ran at full speed. We couldn't really solve it either.
Anyways, the os is just way to clunky and developer-unfriendly for me. We're actively trying to get new laptops so that we can finally ditch these macbooks. Maybe if we were frontend-only they would be more suitable?