That combination of decent performance (even while unplugged), battery life, and silence is hard to come by in x86 laptops, even in ultraportables built with efficiency-focused laptop CPUs where one would expect at least battery life and fan noise to not be issues.

Apple’s silicon helps here but I wonder if part of the problem isn’t x86 laptop manufacturers trying too hard to juice perf numbers at the cost of all else, as well as penny pinching on heatsink and fan.

I agree with some of that, but none of it is worth sacrificing user freedom. Using an Apple product is being forced to use computers in exactly the way Apple designed them, with very little room for customization of the experience. This might be fine if your preferences align with Apple's, or if you just don't care, but for tinkerers and tech enthusiasts it's an oppressive and limited environment. And at the end of the day, it still has its own share of issues, like any device, so it's always a tradeoff.

I'd trade lower build quality and performance per watt for software freedom any day of the week. No, Asahi Linux is not a serious option.

It's an "inconvenient truth" that plenty in the saltier circles of the Linux world really don't like. Getting a good *nix environment on a laptop is a struggle. Even on lines like the ThinkPads you still have paper cuts like bad touchpads, DSP-less audio, terrible battery life, or buggy drivers making the experience unpleasant. Nothing single device has brought everything together as well as an M2 MacBook Pro, and it's a damn shame.

I'll bite for some of your points.

> I've still yet to see another laptop that has even passable handling of sleep states / other parts of power management.

That's the advantage of Apple where they control both hardware and software. It's hard to replicate, so yeah, they have an edge here.

> I've still yet to see another laptop with an even passable trackpad.

Never understood this comment, if you use keyboards instead for shortcuts the trackpad is hardly something you care about. this seems like a comment from Apple users who justify the trackpad as the key differentiator to not even consider anything else, even though the rest of the world has no problem not using Apple trackpads.

> I've still yet to see a laptop with a keyboard as nice as the current generation MacBooks.

Lenovo Thinkpad line has world-class keyboards that put the Macbook's to shame.

> laptop with as slick of a chassis and display.

display, they certainly have good ones, but most of them are not matte. As for the chassis, there's really nothing special in having a uniform grey chassis - it's a matter of taste rather than anything else.

> I've still yet to see another laptop that can chew through demanding workloads, remain snappy the whole time,

Recent AMD CPUs equipped PC, running Linux, fit that description - they are formidable machines with great performance for a variety of workloads and while you will hear the fan now and then, it's still much better than what you had a few years ago.