Linus Torvalds using M2 Macbook Air running Linux

[commiecam]

  Right now I'm cursing this 17" HP Elitebook because its SD socket, audio socket and ethernet socket are all either intermittent or dead and a few of the others feel physically loose..  A hundred or more bucks to get them replaced made no sense at all, so I bought a USB2 dock that does it all, and if it should die, I'll chuck it and buy another one.  Some stuff belongs in the box, but with numerous high speed ports on most laptops these days, even cheap ones, I'd rather keep the main box simple.

I sympathize with your HP experience. I have been shopping for a new laptop for 2 years. Much of what has been available during the pandemic and before it has been of dubious quality.
I'd check the specs and they look wonderful but then I check the reviews and it's "this broke, that broke."
For me though, the big problem is that newer CPUs generate so much heat that many laptops now sound like a jet engine. I've bought and returned several for this reason.
Quiet operation is one appeal of the Macbook air which has no fan. However without Linux it was not possible.
My computer during the past 2 years has actually been the Raspberry pi4b 8GB, which one might assume is too slow, but actually for most of what I do it is fine, and it's been reliable. But it's not a laptop.

That's the reason I have a Pinebook Pro.  Quiet! No fan.  As far as what you NEED, I suggest that a whole lot of people consider what they really NEED.  I'm not talking about extreme gamers, who live and die, vicariously on cpu power.  The computer aboard the Apollo modules that went to the moon would today be put to shame by any cheap pocket calcuulator.  I did my college papers on green on black terminal hooked to a HP-1000 computer with a 32 bit cpu running at about 1MHz, with 3.3 MB of RAM... WHILE it was also acting as our station's data collector and network hub, while being used by six other staff as well  All I'm saying is that seldom, if ever, is a cpu in any modern computer being run much above idling.  The first novel that I wrote, Caribbean Ventures, was written on an early, used Pentium llaptop running Red Hat and I used the vi editor.  No 440 cubic inch V8, no tailfins, no sound system.  Now I can do the same work in a good word processor on a colour screen while listening to classical music while news headlines run across the bottom of the screen, and all for $219.00.