The screen and human interfaces are a lot more important to me than how many GBs it has.
This is the other problem with laptops, generally. A perfectly good machine can be let down by an overly reflective screen, poor trackpad or insane keyboard layout. The only way to know for sure is to fondle them.
I'd add, aim to buy a business laptop rather than a consumer orientated one. They tend to have better chassis, less reflective displays, better keyboards. Batteries, HDD, RAM and even often the CPU is replaceable and more accessible too. It's possible to take them to any half decent technician to be repaired and some manufacturers are offering inclusive 3 year on-site warranties.
As a collection of parts, no. You'll get better spec for far less. And the recent price hike is plain silly.
I don't think anyone is recommending anything on the basis of it being 'a collection of parts'.
As a machine that pleasant and easy to use, I'd say yes. I don't buy other things on the basis of a component list and the sum of their prices, so I'm not sure why thst logic should apply to computers. The screen and human interfaces are a lot more important to me than how many GBs it has. I just want a computer that works with minimal faff and delay. Once upon a time I used to like playing around with computers. These days I want to switch them them on and do stuff. As for macOS vs. Windows, I cry every time I have to use Windows. I think there's some kind of subliminal reprogramming of users that goes on, it's the only reason they're not all rampaging through the streets venting years of fury. It's take a lot to get me back to Windows. It's saying something I'd rather use Linux, and that's like a crash-course in Win95 nostalgia.
All the operating systems have their strengths and weaknesses. I've read that through a few times and it sounds like miss-information. W10 is reasonably snappy, even on my Celeron laptop. The UI is better than it's ever been. It's not particularly hard to use - even my mother is quite adept with it. The networking stack is much better than in Linux or macOS. And I say that as an everyday Linux user. W10's legacy support for older applications and older hardware is second to none. It has all the features you'd look for in any operating system - powershell scripts to interact with Excel spreadsheets? Yes please. Edge isn't my first choice of browser, I don't like that you can't switch the spying features off and the extra features like Xbox I'm no fan of either. But I find it hard to criticise W10 for either it's lack of usability, reliability or how 'fast' it is.
As for Win95 nostalgia, I'm not sure I could liken using any current Linux distro to Win95. Cinnamon is a bit like XP, more by design than by accident.
I'd like to iterate that each OS does have it strengths,
All my Macs have lasted forever, there's a 2009 Mac Mini under the stairs pretending to be a NAS, my 2011 Macbook Air still runs rings around a recent Dell. Yes, yes, someone somewhere will have bought a Mac that turned out to be faulty.
I couldn't recommend Mac's for hardware reliability.
But then people get rather strangely impassioned by computer choice. Personally, it's fridges. Man, I never tire of badmouthing people who chose LG fridges. I mean seriously, P34454s! You can get a Samsung with a P34643X compressor for half the price.
There's a reason for this, and that's the way that the fondness for Apple's offerings is mind boggling. They aren't exactly a panacea for usability or ease of getting things done that people perceive them to be. If that were the case, I'd be using one to type out this message. And I wouldn't find myself offering so much support to the small number of Mac users in my work place. MacOS is like a sandbox which offers a good veneer of usability but it doesn't hold the users hand in quite the way it needs too. It doesn't stop users from filling their disks up to the extent the machine takes a long time to boot and becomes hellishly unresponsive. It doesn't give the user a clue what's going on when network connectivity is broken because the routing table is missing a default entry. It doesn't tell the user that networking isn't working because Bonjour has decided to saturate the network interface. And whilst the finish on them is very nice, the actual build quality is awful. So is the way they seem to treat their customers. Don't take my word for it, watch some of the repairs undertaken by Louis Rossmann and judge for yourself.
Yes it's nice that the interface is so consistent across a range of apps and it's nice how it just works with other Apple devices. And yes I could possibly entertain the idea of recommending Apple products if they weren't so ludicrously overpriced.
Video editing covers a variety of sins – certainly a Macbook will handle splicing together home video clips etc., but high-end stuff really does benefit from significant oomph. Video transcoding is processor intensive, but to be honest, nothing that overtaxes a modern processor. If you're planning to take on Pixar, of course, that's pro territory.
Again there's some level of naivety here. Laptop CPUs fall into two camps - workstation CPUs and ultra-mobile CPUs. Those in the former camp are intended for use in 'mobile workstations' whilst the latter are intended to sip up as few electrovoles as possible in order to prolong the life of increasingly small batteries. Small to save weight and bulk of 'ultra-portable' laptops. For anything more than rendering 720p you really want a CPU from the first camp. And that in MBP guise is very spendy. Not that Apple make it easy to discern what CPUs are in their devices these days.