Name: The Windows Laptop Problem
Uploaded: 2026-03-25T21:32:58.000Z
Duration: 10 min 49 s
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Adverbs of degree

So two really crazy Mac laptops have come out in the past month: the MacBook Neo, which is one of the best deals in tech in a long time, 600 bucks, and

more efficient and more capable and better built than almost every other laptop in that price range, and

the new MacBook Pros at the opposite end of the spectrum.

I've been benchmarking a $6,000 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro, and the results are just getting ridiculous.

It has multicore CPU performance at the top of the charts for every Mac ever,

and the GPU is now more powerful than the M2 Ultra in my $10, 000 Mac Pro,

and the new SSD's read-write speeds are upgraded, approaching 20, 000 megabytes per second.

Both of these computers are putting Windows laptops on notice, and

by extension, Microsoft and Dell and HP and ASUS and Lenovo and Razer, etc., all on notice.

There was a quote recently from an ASUS executive that described the new MacBook Neo as a shock to the industry,

and yes, but it also got me thinking, what is actually happening with the rest of the industry?

What is happening on the Windows side of the fence?

I started getting my hands on a bunch of these Windows laptops and researching and benchmarking,

and it's become pretty clear the more I think about it that Windows versus Mac laptops is basically the same as iPhone versus Android, because just like Android, the advantage of the Windows side is the variety and the choice,

but that's also now both an advantage and a disadvantage that's getting kind of scary now.

I used to really like XPS computers back in the day, so my oldest computers were XPSs.

Then Dell did this thing where they killed off the XPS, the Latitude and the Inspiron names,

and rebranded them into Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max for some reason.

Then they came back to their senses and brought back XPS, and I bought this one,

and this thing is really nice: 14-inch 2.8K tandem OLED display, thin bezels all the way around with a webcam and no notch, 120 Hertz variable refresh rate,

and then it's this thin all-metal jacket with soft-touch finish around the palm rests, which hide a massive force-touch trackpad.

There's three Thunderbolt ports, there's a headphone jack,

and then inside is an Intel Panther Lake processor, this one a Core Ultra 300 series with their new integrated GPUs, plus 32 gigs of DDR5 RAM and a terabyte SSD.

I liked a lot of the previous XPSs, like I said,

but this one is in a lot of ways better than those,

Like, the ports are all Thunderbolt 4 instead of Thunderbolt 5,

and there's no SD card slot or any other full-size ports, which on a premium laptop like this is a choice.

There's also no lip to open the lid for some reason, so it's always this little awkward pry to, like, get the laptop open every single time.

And then the keyboard is probably its weakest point.

The layout is slightly wonky with these top menu buttons, which get slightly more misaligned the further from the outside you get.

But otherwise, I mean, yeah, this is really nice.

So this is a $2, 200 laptop as specced, so obviously a pretty premium option,

but this is, you know, just one of many premium options you could pick.

Well, in Windows land, this laptop, being really good, actually

relies on a bunch of different companies all executing really well at the exact same time, right?

So it relies on Dell putting a lot of effort into actually bringing back the XPS line and not cheaping out and doing the metal build quality and the nice display and the whole premium design.

It also relies on Intel and this exact generation of Panther Lake chips being good and actually having good integrated graphics because they don't actually offer this laptop with a discrete GPU,

and it relies on Microsoft to actually do a good job with Windows so that the software experience is worthy of a premium price tag and not riddled with ads or unnecessary AI features.

And if it all happens, then together this laptop feels like it's worth the premium price,

but you can probably see where I'm going with this.

And lately, Windows has felt like a weak link,

and every single Windows laptop will have to suffer for it.

Now, it's not that the whole OS is, like, fundamentally bad.

It's still functional, but it's just lacking the super premium feel that wins everybody over.

Like, this XPS, the first time I booted this up to set it up, it took me, like, 45 minutes because of all the forced updates and then all these mandatory sign-ins,

and then it's asking me to use Microsoft 365 and then OneDrive and then all these other services, etc., etc.

Like, I got a pop-up ad for McAfee Security on this $2, 000 brand new laptop, which, to be fair, is probably a Dell problem,

but then that's not even mentioning all the other AI stuff that Microsoft is pushing, the Copilot stuff, the infamous recall feature that everyone hates.

There's generative AI in Microsoft Paint now, for crying out loud.

Microsoft actually requires a dedicated Copilot button on the keyboard of every new Windows 11 laptop now to be classified as an AI PC, whatever that means.

It's just not really feeling like a totally premium experience.

And at that high end, when you're spending a lot, users will start to get deservedly really picky.

And that's where Apple has pretty much exclusively been playing for, like, the last decade.

The cheapest new MacBook was always $1,000, and then it went way up from there.

And they are so vertically integrated with their Apple Silicon,

and so the hardware is designed for the software,

and the software is designed for the hardware, and it's always felt so efficient and clean and performant,

and people just love their expensive MacBook Pros.

Now, there's obviously still reasons why people buy high-end Windows laptops.

It's still a lot of the choice and the variety,

and there are certain things you still can't get in Mac land.

Like, if you want a high-end gaming laptop, you know, that's one of those common things.

You can go get a Razer Blade with a 5070 and a 240 Hertz display.

but every one of those relies on all of the parts from all those different companies, again, being good at the same time,

and this is where it gets really interesting because it turns out, as we're learning, a lot of these efficiencies that Apple's been using to dominate the high end are also very effective in the low end because, to be clear, people are absolutely willing to accept some more shortcomings in lower-priced laptops.

You know, if you shop around, hey, maybe you'll be able to find a laptop with just the right set of trade-offs that you don't mind while still being decent at the stuff you care about.

Like, this is the Acer Aspire 16, super popular laptop in this segment.

It's actually discounted recently, so I got it for $550 from Amazon,

and there's a few more stickers on it, yes,

and the keyboard deck flex is just a little bit lacking in build quality, yes,

and the Snapdragon chip that powers it, you know, it's not gonna have the highest-end performance,

but it's efficient, so it has good battery,

and then there's a nice big 16-inch screen and a bunch of full-size ports here.

So if I'm just gonna be writing or web browsing or watching videos on this thing, it feels like a pretty good value.

So look, laptops like this have been just fine.

They've been thriving at these price points, but here's the problem.

Here's the brand new Gatorade-colored MacBook Neo-shaped problem.

The starting price for a MacBook has been $1,000 for a new machine for the past couple of years.