Nothing can beat a macbook at what? I literally can't think of one thing. Maybe battery life? Maybe? It's surely not compatibility, long term support, reparability, or performance per $1.
They dropped support for every graphics APIs except their own. They launched a greenwashing campaign that is always out of stock of parts, updates are mandatory regularly regress performance on old hardware, and we all know you're paying an apple premium for the same performance as something 60-70% the price.
They used to define good build quality, but most laptops are pretty sturdy these days.
While I haven't used every laptop out there, the Macbook track pad is the only one that I have used that has not made my fingertip skin hurt after a short time of use.
I know this is a little weird, and I have never talked to another person with this problem, but all of the cheap plastic ones, strangely textured ones, smooth-yet-somehow-massively-friction ones all make my skin hurt. The Apple one doesn't for whatever reason.
I think I had a Gateway laptop a long time ago that also didn't heat my fingers to temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun or cause me pain to use. Like a really long time ago.
I go to the local store and try out track pads every so often (like once per year maybe?), and they are all just shit. That's enough to keep me buying Macbooks for now.
Like I said, this is a weird issue that I have never known anyone else to have, but it is a pretty critical one for me.
Also, I just want to point out, that I only mean the materials of the track pad itself, not the drivers or anything. I have no complaints about e.g. Linux track pad drivers. I put Fedora on my wife's Surface Pro 8, and the track pad drivers there are fine, for example.
You're not evaluating laptops holistically. You can always find something that is lighter, runs faster,or has a longer battery, but right now it's tough to find any laptop that can compete with the current crop of MacBooks in all these metrics at once. The only place Apple really falls behind some of the competition is repairability.
They dropped support for every graphics APIs except their own. They launched a greenwashing campaign that is always out of stock of parts, updates are mandatory regularly regress performance on old hardware, and we all know you're paying an apple premium for the same performance as something 60-70% the price.
They used to define good build quality, but most laptops are pretty sturdy these days.