[totalhack]

I just went through this process and ended up getting the HP Omnibook Ultra Flip with a core 7 258v, running Ubuntu 24.10. Performance is excellent, battery life is the best I've ever had on an Intel running Linux. If you truly need more RAM than 32 GB it won't be an option though.

The air or an mb pro seems so nice until I remember the sting of dealing with the dev environment and docker on a Mac compared to Linux. No amount of battery life or marginal jump in performance (which gets lost through needed virtualization) will make up for that for me.

[seec]

It does seem quite nice. Is the pen input decent? If the build quality is OK the pricing is quite good, in France with 32Go/1To is 650€ cheaper than an equivalent MacBook Air. I have not looked for a proper CPU comparison but I don't that it matters that much for a device of this type, and as you said, with Apple Silicon you lose a lot of the performance once you venture away from optimized software (which is still quite restrictive).

Considering the (relative) failure of the ARM push for Windows PCs I doubt ARM is going anywhere in the consumer market (that probably means it will stay niche in the server market as well but we'll see).