For those that know me, I’ve never wanted a MacBook. The price tag never appealed to me, and there was nothing that it could do that Windows couldn’t. But a few things have changed over the years, or in some cases, haven’t changed at all. And that’s a bad thing.
Battery
The first laptop I ever bought was a bloated, inexpensive, budget laptop from HP. It cost me $400 and I bought it from the now-defunct Future Shop. I was lucky if the battery life lasted 8 hours and the Windows 7 apps at the time ran fine on it as long as I didn’t have too many open.
In 2021, my most recent Windows laptop was a premium Windows device that cost 3x more than the lumpy HP I first bought. I loved it at first because it was fast at startup and whizzing around Windows 11 was relatively quick and it looked nice (most of the time, more on that later). But something dawned on me, and it was this: I was lucky if the battery lasted 8 hours.
In an entire decade of technological advancement, my battery life on a premium Windows device hadn’t changed. It was still a paltry few hours.
Apps
When it comes to apps, apps on Windows feel slower now even though I’m running on the latest CPUs. I noticed that more apps on Windows are websites nowadays, and many of these apps are sluggish. Slack, Teams, Spotify, and even the Copilot app from Microsoft are all just fancy websites wrapped in their own desktop window. All the advancements in CPU power in 10 years, all wasted. And while the Edge browser itself is the default browser on Windows, it doesn’t feel like the two were built to work well with each other. Try using touch screens on Windows and it’s great. Touch screen on Edge? Weird and unnatural experience.
I’ve reached a point in my life when I have little patience for gadgets, especially when they expect me to pay a premium. So it was time to try something I never thought I’d ever own: a MacBook Air.
Greener pastures
My M3 model from Costco was the same price as my previous premium Windows laptop, but there’s no other way to say this: the MacBook Air M3 is the best laptop hardware I’ve ever used.
Not only is the midnight hue clamshell brilliant to the eyes and to the touch, its battery lasts days. Read that again, days. My laptop experience jumped from praying for 8 hours to going on weekend road trips to Vancouver BC without bringing my MacBook’s charger at all.
I think the battery life of the MacBook is related to Apple’s software. A lot of Apple ‘s first party apps are fast, they’re native, and they all speak the same design language. It’s a cohesive experience that I never realized I wanted. On Windows, apps have different design languages. And many apps, including first party apps, are just websites masquerading as apps. It’s disappointing because there are incredible high performance native apps on Windows like WhatsApp, but it’s no longer the norm. The lack of native Windows apps is a missed opportunity, a problem that Apple has managed to avoid. Apps run great on my MacBook. And lastly, you can run Windows apps in a pinch with Parallels. It works beautifully.
Not perfect
The MacBook is not perfect, though. Window management is strange on macOS. When I want to minimize something, it appears separately on the taskbar from its icon. You also can’t easily organize your windows side by side. It’s also strange that you can’t connect to another screen and only display on that second screen. And updates on macOS feel so heavy and slow, while on Windows updates are fast. Lastly, I feel that Windows is the more productive OS. If I needed a device for office work, I would request Windows.
But at home, on the road, and for hobby app development, my MacBook Air M3 is the best laptop I’ve owned so far. For anyone looking for laptops at around $1000, look no further.
My only wish is that Windows laptops would find a way to compete. “Copilot+” PCs have started coming out, but I’m not paying for a $1000+ device with one keyboard key that does absolutely nothing. I’m also not interested in any AI feature on my PC if the core issues I have are still not addressed.
Wrap up
It’s been nearly 15 years since I bought that $400 HP low budget laptop. Shouldn’t I be able to buy a laptop by now that runs fast native apps, with a cohesive design language, and without needing my charger for a weekend road trip? You can, but it’s a MacBook.
PS – I still have a desktop Windows PC that I use more often than the MacBook at home. But when I go places, I use the MacBook Air.
