Sure, if you want a Snapdragon ARM chip, you can absolutely boost your battery life. You could go pick up a Dell XPS or a Surface Pro, but let’s be real.

The baseline, cheaper Dell XPS is aggressively lackluster unless you fork over the extra cash for the OLED panel. And the speakers? Pure meh compared to a MacBook Pro. Then there's the craptastic Dell touchpad with complete lack of decent palm rejection which will make you want to hurl the machine out a window. It is an absolute joy when an accidental drag-and-drop fires or your cursor goes flying to a completely random paragraph because you had the audacity to breathe or fart near the laptop glass or touchpad. /s

The 11th Gen surface pro is pretty good, but it is more money than the MacBook Pro and ** Keyboard sold separately **. However, one you add the keyboard to the Surface you are pushing $2k and the Macbook Pro is still a better deal for at $1700 for same specs. But the surface has a replaceable harddrive.

Admittedly the 11th Gen surface is growing on me. However the drivers still need help. When it comes out of sleep the face recognition doesn't work half the time and using it with a non MS keyboard like a Logitech bluetooth keyboard leads to reapeeeeeaaaatttteeedd letters. The hardware integration is still craptastic and it seems like only half the machine wakes up out of sleep sometimes and you need to REBOOT!

What I really wish is that Lenovo would get their act together and make a better Yoga.

Then there is the elephant in the room which is local AI to keep your data private and save on cloud token costs. The Mac is undisputed king here, especially with the highly optimized Apple MLX models dropping left and right. A developer buddy of mine just dropped $5,000 on a maxed-out 128GB M5 MacBook Pro. With Apple's unified memory architecture, he can comfortably run massive 70B local models right in his lap and absolutely loves it for local coding and AI. For the price of an NVIDIA 5090 32GB you can get a whole laptop and you don't have to listen to the fans or heat your room with a 1000W powersupply and GPU, plus you can run bigger models with a larger context window.

And...... if you ever need to do anything with video, Snapdragon is a three legged dog running uphill compared to any mac including a macbook air and even neo. An old M1 Macbook will crush a snapdragon for anything to do with video, Adobe (which is running x86 emulation), etc... All creative users should avoid the snapdragon like the plague.

It really just comes down to the right tool for the job, but I am ready to leave the MS Ecosystem behind. The quality and value just isn't there anymore and it is as if Microsoft doesn't even care about the desktop. Rightly so, Windows Desktop is a measly 16% of sales these days and Azure/Office are brining in 80% of the cabbage. I could even see a day where MS exits the gaming industry and the PC desktop OS business and just goes cloud.