Number of reasons. Works well with Apple products, long battery life, way more powerful for most normal (sometimes applies to even some basic UI devs and small project video editing). It’s got great hardware. However Apple is a nightmare capitalist company that’ll try to dime and nickel you for every possible thing.

Unified memory. On a current gen Mac work station you can functionally have 512GB of VRAM for AI tasks for under $10k. Good luck getting anywhere close with Nvidia or AMD.

They're also idiot proof, when I fuck up my CUDA drivers sending me down a 4-hour-long hunt for improperly installed visual studio files, a part of me is envious of Mac owners who will never know my pain.

People pay for the simplicity.

Honestly, I’d love a cost equivalent laptop in could put Linux on in Europe, but for the money the MacBook Air is just really hard to beat

HP consumer equipment is pretty trash to be honest. Even their "business" models. Servers are solid though.

I can't stand Lenovo due to their Fn and CTRL key swapping places, dell is my go to for last 10 years.

Yea man, you need an inverter generator for that. Thankfully small inverter generators are very affordable these days.

Best power yours off solar then, cos everything else is generators.

Ask me how I know.

Ok. How?

I've been buying second hand thinkpads for the last decade or so.

They arrive pre-scuffed so I don't need to worry.

You mean the iRag?

I certainly remember when lenovo pushed a keyboard firmware update so bad that it physically damaged a part on thousands of legion laptops and then refused to own up to it. Fuckers. Never again.

*ok I half remembered, I don't actually know that a part was physically damaged but the only permanent fix involves soldering so close enough

Some context...

For one, it wasn't spyware, it was UEFI that, if a user had admin/root privilege, they could modify the firmware despite signinging procedures that should have prevented that. There was no spyware, there was no root kit, there was a vulnerability.

For another:

IdeaPads, Legion gaming devices, and both Flex and Yoga laptops.

Technically it never touched the ThinkPads. Despite some areas where things blur, ThinkPad is still relatively independent of the rest of the product line. While I may not think Lenovo is trying to actively spy on their consumer brands, they do screw up enough that I wouldn't want to touch them (not just security, they cut too many corners in general).

As others have eluded to, military-grade means "meets our minimum spec at the lowest price."

So it means they said "Our casing was made of this material last year, and this is the lowest bidder for the same quality this year."

Military grade is bullshit marketing. Basically anything is military grade