Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron | Op-ed: PC makers used to need to bring their own add-on bloatware—no longer.

I never said “any gaming Windows laptop has good battery life” I literally said “any non gaming laptop I’ve used in the past whothehellknowshowlong has had great battery life”. Nice attempt at trying to twist things but that’s pretty bad.

Ah, I missed a word. My honest mistake! Wasn't intended, I skipped over the word as I was reading. You can understand how if that word was missing that it would be confusing. I'm not going to get into a performance debate over the space of ultrabooks, because it's all over the place compared to the M-series since it's release. Especially on the high-end side. For chromebooks though, you do take a massive hit on overall horsepower — unless the trend of them "slapping in a Intel Celeron and calling it a day" has broken recently.

As far as “a chromebook running windows can do alot more for cheaper” that is factually true. To my knowledge there isn’t a MacBook of any type that is convertible or contains a touchscreen, regardless of your personal feelings on that matter those are massively important features to a lot of users and the market demand reflects that in a very big way. Not to mention a Chromebook running Windows supports a much larger amount of software which, again, may not be important to you personally, but it’s massively important to a lot of people especially with Apple ending OS upgrades going further. And before you run off trying to say “oh but what about boot camp” well you still don’t have a convertible or a touchscreen.

This is the claim I find dubious. Given the rampant success of the Apple line since the advent of the M1, I'm unsure if the lack of a touch-screen mattered to general users. Especially since market for MacOS has grown since then. And you're right, some may really care about a touch screen — but I'd call it a mixed bag. Users may similarly care about things like having dope display, high quality speakers, or a GOAT trackpad. To point at one hardware feature that is missing and calling it a dealbreaker is a bit much.

And sure, a chromebook on Windows can run anything in the Windows suite — it'll be rough for anything that calls for performance compared to an M-series at the moment. Think tasks like Blender, rendering out a video (my MBA chews through 4k footage at faster than real time playback!), high end photo editing, or particularly gross compilations that take a bit of time. My little Air can run games like Diablo4, we have Baldur's Gate 3 (which the betas running on Metal2/3 were awesome), or Fallen Order. It's kinda sweet! Currently, we don't use boot camp either (since there actually isn't a fullblown ARM based Windows yet) generally we use translation layers (sometimes more than one). At the moment it's pretty rare for me to not have a native ARM build of software by major companies, and if it's not (looking at you game devs) I've gotten along quite well with x86 - > ARM translation and/or Windows->MacOS translation.

Like, I'm not claiming chromebooks don't have a use case. Nor am I claiming a MacBook is the GOAT. It's the specific claim "Definitely does more than a MacBook Air and for a lot less," that I don't agree with. Just on the silicon horsepower alone, and I don't have to compromise on battery life, performance, and it's still light while still being itty-bitty! Downside, I pay more. Well, mine I paid $700 for.

Eh, I use the three families of OS's daily. My dev work is on a Windows machine, and the OS is kinda a hot mess. Granted, most of what informs my opinion most end users won't even notice or care about. I say if someone wants to use Windows, go for it. But, I'd only use it if I was literally paid to do so, but that's my taste.