The screen is the killer. you can have a nice-ish 2nd corporate laptop with decent and swappable battery on which you can install a decent OS (non Windows) and get good milage but the screen is something else.
Asking for a machine with "insane battery life, amazing performance, great screen and one of the lightest chassis" and oh, it must be completely silent is a loaded set of demands. Apple in the current market is essentially the only player that can actually make a laptop that can meet your demands, at least without doing a bunch of research into something that's equivalent and hoping the goal posts don't move again.
this is extremely funny in the context of the protracted argument up-thread about what you could reasonably be comparing the macbook air against.
like, the $359 acer shitbox probably doesn't do all the exact same thing as the MBA either, but that's actually ok and really only demonstrates the MBA is an unaffordable luxury product, basically the same as a gold-plated diamond-encrusted flip-phone.
Not your circus, not your clowns, but this is sort of the duality of apple: "it's all marketing and glitz, a luxury product, there's no reason to buy it, and the fact that they have a better product only PROVES it" vs "of course no PC manufacturer could possibly be expected to offer a top-notch 120hz mini-LED screen, a good keyboard, great trackpad, good speakers, and good SOC performance in a thin-n-light..."
