Is raw perf considered Apple's moat? I think it's their software. I would buy a MacOS laptop even if the performance is ghastly ... in fact, I did: the MacBook Neo.
I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.
It doesn't exist. MacBook's simply have the best hardware, but terrible software/philosophy of software.
So I'd say their moat is hardware in general. Performance, yes to an extent, but it's performance vs heat vs energy vs battery life and all their peripherals.
This is Zenbook A16 right now, with recent patches posted to Linux ARM mailing list that support it in full.
> This is Zenbook A16 right now, with recent patches posted to Linux ARM mailing list that support it in full.
Including those two items I emphasised? This is usually where Apple's competition fail, mostly because they don't even consider it.
However, while ZenBook's touchpad is not haptic, it's at least a glass one and generally praised for being quite good in comparison. I asked a bunch of people. Notably I prefer to double tap than press on my touchpads, so I don't really care about the haptic feedback, but to each their own. Still, I think it's worth trying it. BestBuy should have them in store if you're in US, I haven't tried it myself yet.
And yes, it's surprisingly quiet. It's a bigger form factor (16") despite very low weight, so that helps with heat dissipation and X2 is very efficient.
Ghastly was macOS on an Intel MacBook Air.