So I have been running several laptops for the last year or so. A friend gave me some surface books which he didn’t need, I have a Mac mini with an M1 processor, and a system76 Oryx Pro which has served me well for the last 5 years, but it isn’t as portable as it was when I bought it and the battery no longer can maintain a charge for as long as when I purchased it. The Surface Books don’t have very strong battery life, one of which is a standard laptop with an i5 processor which is basically a lap warmer, and the other one has an ARM processor, and its quite good honestly as a hybrid, but still has fairly abysmal battery life.
I also am going to get myself an iPad on contract with my phone carrier over the next couple of days.
So why I am going almost 100% Apple hardware? Well, a couple of reasons honestly.
First of all, Apple Silicon is extremely powerful without the power draw or heat of x86 CPUs. That is a very nice combination of features which I am a major fan of.
Second of all, again, the battery life of Apple Silicon is unparalleled in the market today. It is truly the best value available.
Third, the button placement of Microsoft Surface is absolutely atrocious. Apple puts their buttons one long edge, and one short edge. The Surface puts their buttons all over the place, so there is no short edge without a button, making it a major pain in the butt for setting up when I play music because I am either holding down the volume button or the power button. It is not useful for that purpose. Between the abhorrent button placement and the low battery life, the Surface just doesn’t seem like a good deal compared to the iPad. If Apple allowed users to load MacOS onto the iPad, it would be a Surface killer.
iPad has numerous advantages which makes me choose it over the competition. Android has such a short lifetime of support that it doesn’t fit my environmentalist desires. I have not bought a laptop in 5 years, and it is mostly because of declining battery life that I feel it is finally time for an upgrade. I don’t want to upgrade every 3 years, 5 years for me is a minimum unless if I am recycling unwanted computers. Android doesn’t fit this requirement for me. Apple’s hardware is just superior to the alternatives. The only thing the iPad is missing is the ability to port Linux to any older device, and while I know this is possible with newer iPads, it is not possible with the 2012 iPad which I have lying around. Yes, I know it is a 10 year old device, but the hardware still works, and if I could port Linux to it it would still be a useful device. Hopefully as time goes on Linux on iPad will continue to improve so I can port Linux to it.
So right now after looking at all the variables and options I could find, my needs were a laptop which I can easily travel with, which has a good CPU, a nice display, and enough RAM to fit my needs. The MacBook Air with the M2 processor appears to be the best deal on the market right now from what I can tell. I never seem to run out of RAM on my Mac mini, the only thing I might have added in was another 8 GB of RAM for 16 GB but I decided that given that I will need a good travel laptop in the near future. It was a tossup between the M1 Pro MacBook Pro and the M2 MacBook Air for me, and I decided to go with the MacBook Air over the M1 Pro MacBook Pro. Just make sure you get at least 512 GB of storage, because I have a Mac mini which I got at a steep discount at Costco last year, and you will run out of the 256 GB of storage in the base model very quickly. That right now is the big question I can see, is it worth spending more money for the M1 Pro chip or save a few hundred dollars to buy the M2 MacBook Air with 512 GB of storage. That is for you to decide. Either choice is going to give you an incredible amount of value for your money.