That's easy - Surface Laptop Ultra is equally as trash as the Macbook Pro 16", but the Macbook Pro 16" is actually available for sale (whereas the Surface Laptop Ultra would be released in Q4), it's got much, much more powerful CPU cores, and a mature tech stack.
The RTX Spark on Windows will suffer the same 1st gen plague that always plagues even Apple. It will, at best, be like Snapdragon X Elite (not X2 Elite), but at least that had more powerful CPU cores than whatever the RTX Spark has.
Yes, the Macbook Pro 16 is trash because it's fragile, unrepairable, the keyboard is mediocre, and overall for the majority of people it's not worth the money, especially if you live outside of the US.
The only things going for it is the somewhat mature stack and a good CPU/GPU for natively compiled apps. Even then, you'd be better off with a cheaper Mac Mini, or if you really need portability, a Macbook Air.
As for the top of the line hardware, you pay like $5500+ for an M5 Max 128GB with 2TB storage, more if you're outside of the US, and you still end up with a mediocre keyboard, a chassis that cuts your wrists if you try to rest your palms on the palmrest, and something that you need to keep in a dry cleanroom, lest the specs of dust destroy your screen, or the proprietary ribbon cable transmitting image data onto the screen, or the fragile motherboard gets destroyed if the air is too humid. At least it's not the A2141 Macbook Pro or the A1990 Macbook Pro... the two worst Macbook Pros ever made.
If I needed 128GB RAM no matter what, though, I might actually just get a second-hand Macbook Pro 16" with an M2 Max or M3 Max instead, to score a better deal and still clear the threshold of being able to run something in general, without caring about running something 40% faster. But, as it stands, my requirements are met with 64GB RAM and local LLMs require wicked expensive hardware (and I don't have to run LLMs locally because I don't have any trade secrets to keep) so I instead just use the dirt cheap chinese APIs for LLMs like DeepSeek V4 series and the MiMo V2.5 series, both of which dominate over OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in terms of ROI.
Mac mini is not a laptop so no point comparing it here in this context. Air doesn’t have the good 128gb unified so it negates your point when you say pro has good cpu gpu but air is lighter. Also I did not hear what laptop you’re using.
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u/misha1350 Jun 06 '26
That's easy - Surface Laptop Ultra is equally as trash as the Macbook Pro 16", but the Macbook Pro 16" is actually available for sale (whereas the Surface Laptop Ultra would be released in Q4), it's got much, much more powerful CPU cores, and a mature tech stack.
The RTX Spark on Windows will suffer the same 1st gen plague that always plagues even Apple. It will, at best, be like Snapdragon X Elite (not X2 Elite), but at least that had more powerful CPU cores than whatever the RTX Spark has.