Marketing. macOS has a minority share of desktop operating systems, "best recommended laptops" is an easily-won Keynesian beauty contest.
But, that lowest-common-denominator design philosophy gave us innovations like the Butterfly Keyboard, Touch Bar, Dynamic Island, and now a touchscreen. None of those features inspire much faith in Apple's ability to listen to what their users want from the Macbook. Most people I know want a more powerful iPad, not an iPad-like Mac.
So it cannot possibly be explained as Macs/macOS are still a better product despite some obvious flaws and drawbacks? It has to be cynical marketing and some kind of consumerist corporate conspiracy? I don't get your argument.
Macs and macOS have a very thin market segment: college students, mobile devs and prosumers. They market to them heavily, earning the Mac their recommendation.
Outside of those niches, in places like game development, backend work, high-performance ARM datacenters, edge compute and personal computing, Macs are a second-class-citizen and rarely get recommended. macOS has a niche, those people love it, but it has not broken out into the larger market for decades now. Macs are a minority, still.
Macs are highly recommended by people in the know, like people in computer science departments over the last decade, by HN commenters and specialty magazines, etc. Those are better signals than the superficial market picture you paint.
They are great devices but they cost more. So you would not see them "recommend" in those industries you cite. Also it is reductive to accuse Apple of marketing.
What's much more plausible is that despite being a great product it also costs more. Not marketing nor the fact of being a minority.
It's also weird because your argument disingenuously ignores the wealth of HN commentary in the past about how great the M-chip MacBooks are. It's like ignoring actual reasons and doing this kind of armchair technical market analysis to prove one's point. It's a troll intellectual move to attribute success to marketing and failure to "because it is unpopular". Seeing your other replies in this thread suggests a common pattern of bias, not a one-off.
> Macs are highly recommended by people in the know
This is exactly what I said in the last comment. "People in the know" is a statement that narrows down your audience to a select few groups that Apple narrowcasts to. You arbitrarily ignored the rest of the market as being unqualified to shop for themselves. We have the usage statistics that prove macOS is not a popular alternative to Windows or even Chromebooks. The vast majority of PC shoppers do not buy Macs.
You might call it "disingenuous" to ignore your cherry-picked audience, but I did acknowledge the niches that Apple caters to. You are the one that is unable to reconcile Apple's halo of quality with their mediocre sales performance and rejection by the market at-large. Macs make Apple less revenue than novelty devices like the iPad, and the iPhone blows it out of the water in terms of install base. Apple Silicon isn't even the highest-demand high-performance ARM chipset right now, Nvidia's Grace SOC is. And Grace sucks, but it's modular and scalable enough to replace Apple's discontinued Mac Pro niche.
Cut it however you want; M-series Apple Silicon is chopped liver even in the middle of a compute shortage. The HN echo chamber said that unified memory and AArch64 would irreversibly change the direction of PC design forever, but both of those features have been ignored by other OEMs for the past 7 years. Instead, Apple Silicon is starting to copy design characteristics of competing hardware like Nvidia's CUDA GPUs. So, maybe you shouldn't trust "people in the know" to give you an honest accounting of how Apple Silicon competes with the computers that most people are buying. Their subjective statements cannot be extrapolated into an objective metric.
You must be trolling if half dozen replies in this thread you want me to think that Marvel films are better than art films because they have a bigger market share. This is not worthy of serious reply and it seems the problem is your worldview, not the merit of any argument about Apple.
Well, the commenter said “best recommended,” and usually “best recommended” means it’s at the top of the sales charts or at least somewhere close, not #4 in global marketshare.
If your point is that Apple computers are Oscar-bait for pretentious snobs and you’re just not getting why The French Dispatch is actually a good movie, I’m not sure that analogy helps.
Just like the Oscar snob insults people for enjoying marvel movies, what you’re saying is kind of an insult to how good Lenovo laptops are.
For example, Apple has absolutely nothing that answers to the popularity and suitability for gaming of the Lenovo Legion product line. Want to play games on a Mac? Too bad, it’s a terrible platform for it. Just like a mid-tier art house film, you’re not allowed to have fun on a Mac.
The ThinkPad X9 15p has a really decent set of advantages over a MacBook Pro including a better port selection and better battery life than any M5 MacBook product. The repairability of the Lenovo lineup puts Apple to shame.
But, that lowest-common-denominator design philosophy gave us innovations like the Butterfly Keyboard, Touch Bar, Dynamic Island, and now a touchscreen. None of those features inspire much faith in Apple's ability to listen to what their users want from the Macbook. Most people I know want a more powerful iPad, not an iPad-like Mac.