I’ve been reviewing windows laptops for over 4 years now, and personally buying them for a over a
decade, and even though I’m a big mac fan for many years I’ve still recommended them for many people
up until the end of 2020, but here at the start of 2021 I have to say that there are specifically 3
reasons why you need to be very cautious if you’re in the market for a new laptop, and buying one
right now could be a huge mistake, and no I’m not just gonna telling you to buy an m1 mac instead.
Of course there are still reasons to buy one, and specific laptops that do make sense, so I’ll make
sure to cover that at the end and give you some tips on how to get a laptop that will have great
performance, a good all around experience, and won’t cost you a ton of money like it did me.
As many of you know, we’ve mostly been focusing on compact 13 or 14” lightweight windows laptops
that have become the mainstream since they’ve finally become decent in the last few years.
Before that most ultrabooks that were trying to copy the MacBook Air were failing miserably. Their
keyboards were way worse than 15” laptops, the displays were very dim and reflective,
trackpads were horrible, and the same thing goes with speakers.
I bought an Acer ultrabook 4-5 years ago and it was pure garbage, and I ended up returning it for
a Mac that cost more but the experience was so much better, even though the specs were worse.
But when we started to review them,
every upgrade cycle had decent improvements, starting with the build quality getting solid
with companies starting to use less plastic and more premium materials.
As time went on we got improved webcams, battery life finally started competing with Macs,
companies started putting in better SSD’s, speakers were actually usable,
keyboards were superior to Apples butterfly keys, and even the diving board trackpads
finally became responsive enough to use without needing a seperate mouse.
Not only that, but intel finally started stepping up and creating
better processors as well when their 10nm finally came out,
which resulted in battery life that could beat out a MacBook with older processors,
performance was also a little bit better, and some offered better cooling as well.
They also had some unique features we loved like windows hello for login,
slimmer bezels, and overall size as well. Of coure prices also went up to get close
to or even exceed Apple's MacBooks, but that made sense due to how much better the components were.
Because of that, we routinely started to recommend them and were saying that if you don’t need MacOS,
these windows laptops were definitely a better buy.
That was the case just 6 or so months ago, especially with the Dell XPS 13 9310.
It was an absolute killer laptop, with a display that was just as bright and
color accurate as a MacBook Pro, but not only that, it was actually less reflective as well
which was a first for any windows laptop, and the keyboard
is actually better than Apples brand new magic keyboard in the new macs.
But now I would be very careful buying one, or any of the great alternatives we reviewed, why?
Well here's why I’m frustrated and what's changed in just half a year.
First off, you guys know the biggest change in the laptop space is Apples M1 processors,
but that goes way deeper than Apple having better processor performance than last year,
which I'll explain. I also have multiple other reasons to share, but we’ll start out with that.
Back in june after Apple announced the upcoming Apple silicon Macs,
vadim was super excited about them and started making a series of videos about them.
A lot of people, including me, thought he was being way too hyped up about them.
And you couldn’t really blame us, all of the windows laptop that used ARM processors
that made huge promises in battery life and performance ended up being terrible.
Benchmarks were so-so but once you factored in price. real world performance, and especially
compatibility these ARM machines showed us that ARM wasn’t ready for the mainstream.
But vadim wouldn’t give up, he dug deep into apples whitepapers and super long
press conference videos designed for engineers and developers and found very
interesting bits of information that made it into videos and got the attention of
tech enthusiasts and even creators which called him out on his grandiose predictions.
But you know what, He was absolutely right.
When Apple launched the M1 Macs, even though the machines looked exactly the same,
we were blown away at the performance numbers,
but we’re still a bit skeptical because they seemed too good to be true.
At the same time, Apple ended up effectively lowering the average price of the M1 MacBook
Air to $999, and while at launch I thought it was the least interesting M1 Mac,
this machine that is what's most hurting windows laptops in 2021.
After doing extensive testing, we found out that Apple didn’t overhype their M1 chips with the
performance and battery life they advertised, but they were actually too conservative in many cases.
These M1 Machines absolutely killed the intel based macbooks that came out earlier this year,
and did so while staying cooler and quieter, and in many cases cost less as well. Not only that,
but in certain use cases my M1 Mac Mini smokes my $15,000 Mac Pro and in
many others it keeps up while costing less than 1/15th of the price which is insane.
These ARM chips are insane, Because of this,
Intel just pushed a huge media campaign trying to throw shade on Apple and promoting different
windows laptops just to keep trying to sell their processors to these major brands,
and don’t worry I’ll explain why this matters for windows laptops too.
After a few months and tons of testing, in our long term review
we finally gave our verdict that the M1 MacBook Air is the best Mac to buy,
as it performs almost as well as the Pro while being completely silent and costs $300 less as
the same time, and on top of that, for just a few bucks you can get it to outperform the Pro
for just $999, and more than that, it's the perfect laptop or as close as it can get.
And with that, everyone took notice as well, resulting in Apple growing about 50% compared
to the previous year which is insane and it makes sense why. For the first
time we had windows fans praising apple instead of hating on them,
some buying M1 macs when they have been avoiding them for years or even decades.
At the same time, I had posted a few windows laptops for sale, great ones like Microsoft's
surface book 3, and a Dell XPS. It's been over 6 months since I posted that machine,
and no one wants to buy it. I priced it low even though this thing was $2700 brand new with
32GB of RAM, higher than 4K display, literally specced out, and now it's priced down to $1000
and I can’t get anyone to buy it and I can’t really blame them for it.
Dell has also been dropping their prices, a $2700
laptop is now $1935, probably because they aren’t selling.
And even though it might be tempting to pick up one of these machines, I wouldn’t recommend it.
I said at the start that I’m not just going to suggest buying an M1 mac,
and I won’t, but that definitely is a better option. Not only is an M1 MacBook Air way more
powerful, but it's also cheaper at the same time and resale value will be way better.
Every mac I’ve posted has sold in less than just a few days, even intel ones.
My $1800 4 port sold for $1400 in one day,
where the $2700 XPS has been up for over 6 months and can’t sell for even $1000.
And even though M1’s are only available up to 16GB, that 16GB performs way better than 16GB
in a windows machine as we showed in our XPS RAM comparison which I’ll link below.
And when comparing two similarly priced Mac and Windows machines, like the new LG gram which is a
great all around laptop, the M1 Air is better in basically every single way and costs $200 less,
and on top of that you can sell it a year later for almost no loss where no one will want your LG,
which is why Dave lee had to make an update video saying the MacBook air is too good.
And that's the second and probably main reason not to buy a windows laptop in 2021.
Everyone now knows that thanks to Apple's push ARM is finally going to hit the mainstream.
These machines have been out for years in windows laptops but no one cared,
but as soon as m1 came out software companies scrambled to make their X86 apps work for
ARM and this is massively helping Microsoft as well.
If you’re going to buy a windows ultrabook, it's going to be outdated faster than ever before,
and will be replaced by similar windows machines using upcoming ARM processors
that will bring better performance in silent and cool packages with killer battery life,
and you’ll soon want to upgrade just like many mac users did, but unlike a mac it will be very tough
to sell it so you’ll either give it away for almost nothing or gift it to someone you know.
Because of that, if you want to buy a laptop in 2021, unless its a gaming laptop,
I would either try your best to wait just a bit longer for a great new Windows ARM machine,
or buy a mac in the meantime. ARM is finally here and its changing the laptop world.
And if you absolutely need a windows laptop and you need it now, buy it from someone like
me who has a crazy machine that they can’t sell and will give it away for relatively nothing.
Go ahead and check out vadims vid on how Apple put the final nail in intel coffin,
and if you enjoyed the video click above to subscribe to help us reach
1 million subscribers in 2021. This has been max and I’ll see you in the next video.