Well I've been skeptical of macbooks ever since they charge $500 for a soldered SSD with 250gb of storage. Nothing cost more than an Apple and it is closed from end to end. They are for people who have a lot of money and dont know a thing about computers.
Windows 11 is a hot piece of garbage. macOS might have its quirks, and it is certainly not without fault, but in my use case, it is far more stable than Windows.
Macs are expensive yes, but so are some laptops, like gaming ROG or Alienware or Razer stuff. Also, many Windows laptops have soldered RAM and SSD storage, so it is not unique to the Macintosh. Macbooks used to be upgradable (RAM and storage), but that was in the Steve Jobs days.
Apple Silicon is super power efficient for the performance you get in return. When my macbook is sitting idle or I'm just browsing the web or watching a video or movie, it consumes just 6W! And no more than 20-25W under load. I never hear the fan ever. I can't say the same about my Windows-based laptop for work, which sounds like a jet engine from time to time, especially during video calls on zoom or Teams.
And your complaint about soldered SSD storage is true, but one way around that is to add thunderbolt-based NVME storage. With how cheap SSDs are these days, and the declining cost of thunderbolt/usb4 enclosures, it is easy to add terabytes of storage for far less than $500. You can pay $200 to $250 tops for 2TB of thunderbolt-based storage ($100 for the nvme enclosure, and $100 to $150 for the 2TB drive if based on pcie4, and even cheaper if based on PCIe3).
Yes thunderbolt 3/4 are based on PCIe3x4 with a real-world top speed of 2800 MB/sec. But that is more than fast enough as compared to the astronomical cost of adding the same amount of internal storage. Finally, with non-intel USB4 controllers now finally coming to market, USB4 NVME enclosures such as the Zike Drive (which uses AsMedia's USB4 controller) top out at around 3800 MB/sec. Not bad at all.
