John Gruber recently took umbrage with Wirecutter’s pick for best laptop. Here’s what he wrote:

My longstanding complaint about The Wirecutter is that they institutionally fetishize price over quality. That makes it all the more baffling that their recommended “Best Laptop” — not best Windows laptop, but best laptop, full stop — is a Dell XPS 13 that costs $1,340 but is slower and gets worse battery life (and has a lower-resolution display) than their “best Mac laptop”, the $1,000 M1 MacBook Air.

Not only do I agree with John’s objection about pricing, I’ll add my own about terminology. In an article titled “The Best Laptops”, Wirecutter confusingly refers to the “best in show” category as “best ultrabook“, and describe “ultrabook” as follows:

[Ultrabooks] have great keyboards, screens, and battery life, they offer enough power to do everything most people need a computer for, and they’re thin, light, and portable. You should expect to pay between $900 and $1,300 for a great Windows ultrabook that will last you three to four years.

Take out the word “Windows” and what the authors describe is the category of laptop defined by the MacBook Air. In that sense, “ultrabook” really means “off-brand MacBook Air”. Naming the category “best ultrabook” instead of “best laptop” feels like a deliberate cop-out to justify excluding Apple’s MacBooks.

Wirecutter’s exclusion of MacBooks from a category that is effectively “best laptop” is the latest bit of evidence in a recent trend I’ve noticed wherein reviewers have inexplicably stopped comparing Wintel laptops to Apple’s MacBooks. Compare Ars Technica’s review of the Surface Laptop Go 2 from this month to their review of the Surface Book 2 from 2017. The current review only includes other Wintel laptops in benchmarks whereas the one from 2017 included that year’s MacBook.

If memory serves, including Macs in PC hardware comparisons was more or less the norm just a few years ago. I can’t fathom why some reviewers have recently stopped doing so. Is it that reviewers don’t think they could fairly compare x86 and ARM laptops? It seems easy enough to me. Are they afraid that constantly showing MacBooks outperforming Wintel laptops will give the impression that they are in the bag for Apple? I don’t see why. Facts are facts, and a lot of people need or want to buy a Windows laptop regardless.

I can’t help but wonder if, in the minds of many reviewers, MacBooks were PCs so long as they used Intel, and therefore they stopped being PCs once Apple switched to using their own silicon.

When Intel ran its “Go PC” campaign with Justin Long, I criticized the company for commoditizing itself.

Make fun of Apple or not, the goal of this campaign should have been “a laptop without Intel is like a burger without Heinz“. Instead, Intel commoditized itself by creating an ad campaign that highlights all of the benefits of PC laptops regardless of what’s inside of them.

The recent reviews that exclude comparisons between Wintel laptops and Apple Silicon based MacBooks proves that point. Intel could’ve said that a laptop without a processor made by them isn’t a PC. Would it have been fair? Not really, but it would have worked because that sentiment was and seemingly still is in the air.

Update: Since posting I wanted to validate my sense that excluding MacBooks from comparisons from PC laptops was a recent trend so I looked at two sites: The Verge and Ars Technica. The Verge doesn’t really do comparisons, but I found a couple of post-m1 and a couple of pre-M1 reviews by multiple reviewers on Ars Technica, all of which don’t include MacBooks in comparisons. Not only that, I also found what seems to be Wirecutter’s 2018 Best Laptops guide (on Medium of all places), which also leans on the term “ultrabook” and also splits out Macs into a separate category. So there goes my theory that this is a recent trend.

That said, I do think it somewhat aligns with my speculation that whether or not MacBooks are included depends largely on whether the reviewer sees them as relevant to PC laptops. How reasonable that is varies in my mind. While I don’t think MacBooks should be excluded from comparison in reviews of consumer and professional laptops, even I wouldn’t expect to see them in reviews of PC gaming laptops.

Finally, I (and I suspect Gruber) have been on alert about this subject because even laptop reviews that do compare PC laptops with Apple Silicon based MacBooks seem to understate just how much better these MacBooks are in terms of power, noise, and battery life. It’s no longer a choice between a compromised laptop that runs Windows and another compromised laptop that runs macOS. It’s a choice between a hot and noisy and/or slow PC laptop running Windows and a cool, silent, and fast MacBook. Most buyers don’t know that choice now exists, and it’s the reviewer’s job to educate them. Excluding MacBooks from consideration does those buyers a considerable disservice.