I see you've sailed in the Bay Area....sport sailing (small sailboats): Not a practical means of transportation, but a great way to...(go) really fast in circles on the weekend, while getting soaking wet and bitterly cold.
I wish that were still true. Macs used to be my go-to for a laptop that Just Worked(tm), but they've become increasingly unreliable with every new Macos release. I used to skip every other release because they alternated primarily bugfix releases with new-feature releases in the Jobs era.Nearly everyone uses a computer as an appliance: You buy it at a store, it has a working OS on it, it gets upgraded (today that's nearly completely automatic), and there is no need to make decisions. And they work exceedingly well, with very little effort.
Alas, that is no longer the case. Every new release is chock-full of new "features" I don't want (a "news" app I can't uninstall? WTF?), and breaks basic backwards compatibility.
It's become clear to me that Mac is a legacy product for Apple. They're a phone company now, and they're trying to unify all their products around the same hardware and software platform. I give it 5 years before a Macbook is just an iPad with a keyboard.