Edit: Jesus Christ, people. If you buy a $150 Thinkpad made by slave labor instead of a $1,200 MacBook made by slave labor, you're still supporting a capitalist economy based on slave labor. We all do. We have no choice. The number of smug liberals in the comments saying "well I buy a cheap used laptop" or "well I buy coffee beans and make my own coffee" are completely missing the fucking point.
Don't tell yourself your consumption is moral. All of us make unethical choices every day because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Accept your shame and guilt and let it drive you to do better.
hot take: maybe im a tech nerd and this is why, but i would feel genuinely bad if i spent more than like 300-500 dollars on a laptop.
An Apple laptop is just a totally inappropriate amount of money spent on a laptop for the overwhelming majority of use cases.
If you really want to smash capitalism buy used gear and run Linux
Edit: OP's edit about no ethical consumption is true in the strictest sense, but there are degrees of both consumption and morality and Apple is one of the worst companies on the planet with respect to both. Apple uses its money to very actively attack worthy causes like Right to Repair, throws their immense weight around to enforce monopolies, and just generally is an active detriment to society in the long-term.
Yes I know much of that doesn't matter under a non-capitalist production and labour model but OP's point is that this is the world we live in at the moment and that's exactly what I'm commenting on: you can make things suck less by not supporting this garbage wherever possible. Better yet, actively support advocacy organizations like those backing Right to Repair.
even for the use cases where you would be doing productivity, because apple refuses to build them to do fuck all for some reason. Though with the m series macs, you can just pay an additional 500 dollars and get an actually usable amount of ram. It used to be a lot worse on the intel macs because apple didnt understand heat dissipation
If you want to smash capitalism in general, engage in the second hand market wherever possible, it's your friend, it saves you money, it saves ewaste from the planet, and it prevents you from giving money to the big corpo.
Same