That’s true. I have a MacBook as well (M1, gift from a couple of years ago) and I don’t use it. Okay it’s fast, but what I do on a laptop doesn’t need that power at all. Battery life is very valid (which is a problem with my old ThinkPad), but with Framework catching up, it’s less of an argument in the future.
And I honestly don’t feel much of a difference when using my MacBook compared to my ThinkPad in terms of performance (and my ThinkPad has 2 cores and 4 threads mind you), but I mostly just browse and do C programming (I know that there is a massive difference in power, I just don’t need it in day to day use). For everything that needs a lot power I use my desktop computer.
In the end it just comes down to priorities I suppose. For me personally, privacy has become one of the most important concerns because I think it’s fucked up how much companies are allowed to know about us individually, and I don’t want them to keep getting information about me.
No battery life, no ARM processor, no retina display, no broken glass design and no other gimmick I don’t really need can justify what they are doing, at least in my opinion. I‘d rather need to inconveniently charge my laptop every 2 hours because the battery is dead then to have some company know more about myself then I do.
As if wealthy people pay for stuff they could have for free. Literally everybody had their copyright infringed from the training of GenAI. Authors, Journalists, Artists, Musicians, Regisseurs, the list is endless. Unless you sue, you won’t see any compensation from them. By now you should know that companies only play fair if they’re forced to, otherwise literally anything goes.
It’s quite naive to believe they would pay for API access, tbh.