WhyGee

It's mystifying that you'd deliberately compare a 2019 anything to a previous generation MacBook. Why d'you do that? How is the story not tainted from the very headline? Worse yet, you ding Apple on value, but as a publication, you derive half of your income on promo ads where you ‘unearth’ huge discounts, especially on previous-generation gear. So at the very least, price out the MBP at the price you'd buy it for yourselves (at a great discount, with no sales tax to 48 states). This sounds like a Razer-sponsored post masquerading as a review. I thought only 9-to-5 did those.

‘Windows’ is a me-too moniker that someone thought up when cloning the Mac.

‘Surface’ was the same company's approach of a combo laptop / tablet.

They succeeded in putting Netscape out of business by declaring that browsers were part of the OS.

Bing did not dethrone Google.

MS is untouchable as a desktop software productivity, desktop OS, and server & file sharing publisher (among a few other fiefdoms).  
In these areas, they literally print money the way Facebook and Google do in advertising.
MS is now successfully contesting the cloud space from Amazon and others.
That's not too shabby.

Steve Jobs' strength was his ability to not want to compete in every single area.

Another remarkable editorial by DEG.

Google and Amazon place trojan horses within your environment.

Google is only about disseminating our private data to advertisers in exchange for their ad dollars.  No matter what the project they take on, if it doesn't fulfill that primordial ambition, it doesn't happen or it gets canned rapidly.

Amazon is slightly different, but its Alexa product is not a pure play home electronics product.  It's a circuitous gambit that is part of another, greater strategy.

Apple's speaker will fill your room with sound first and foremost.  Its partaking of your single Apple I.D. and its hooks into Apple's walled garden are nice bonuses.  But the customers have been warned to expect a kickbutt speaker, which Alexa and Assistant are not, and do not aspire to be.

JessiReturns said:

Most of this is good analysis, but when Daniel talks about "Fake news", don't forget he's a hard core marxist.

You agree with the content, but not the author.
Then you deviate into an Orwellian tirade decrying an orwellianism that lives only in your mind.

The gap that separates FOX News from Mao Zedung is wider than the Pacific ocean.  (That too is an exaggeration).

This is a tech story.  Facebook tracks its users very thoroughly, even when they're not logged in to the service.  Some folks resent it and might have an interest in a different paradigm.

Fake news, clickbait and surveillance ads are a reality.  

Money in politics is every bit as toxic as money in news.

A TV newscast that gets interrupted for commercial announcements is diminished by the introduction of a sponsor.  
The concentration of the media outlets in relatively few hands is another problem.

Declaring that money equals speech is specious (e.g., Citizens United).

But I humbly believe that there remains a sizable difference between (1) news gathered and disseminated by professional journalists and (2) news fabricated from scratch.