I have a keyboard for the iPad that is also the cover for it. It makes the iPad a little bulkier, but it is a breeze to type on and much smaller and lighter than a laptop. And for extended writing, I prefer a desktop, but perhaps I need to evolve.
(emphasis added)
I carry two ViewSonic screens in my laptop bag so I can run three displays whenever I’m out on the road. It’s quite a good idea in general! They’re the same size as the 15" laptop screen, run power and video signal on a single connection each, lightweight and fold down very cleverly.
This is why I’m so attached to my 15 inch 4k screen. I can actually work on it without any penalties, and don’t need an external monitor. I’m not opening giant maps, or big spreadsheets, though. Most of the time I just have a whole bunch of terminal windows open. At 4k the text is extremely crisp regardless of how large or small I make the windows.
I go through this with people at work all the time. If you want something you’ll be carrying very frequently, get a 13" and use external monitors when necessary. If you will mostly use it in one place, then get a 15" and only get an external monitor if you want multiple screens.
I do really like the new Dell USB-C monitors that have a builtin hub. Connect your keyboard, mouse, ethernet, and even another monitor to the USB-C monitor. Then all you have to do is plug the USB-C cable into your laptop, and you’re done. No need for a power brick or dongles.
We went through the opposite as people were returning to work from the pandemic. Which is a better microphone, the one in a $2000 MacBook Pro, or the $7.99 Amazon special? I eventually just took the cheap mics out of the conference rooms, because all they caused were complaints. I don’t know who bought them. Eventually we got dedicated conference/Zoom things, and the microphone on those is excellent.
My old MacBook pro was 15", and while i had an external monitor, i almost never used it. When i bought the new one, the choices were 14" or 16". I bought the 14", and it’s just not quite enough space. I find myself using the external monitor a lot more than I’d like to.
Which is one of the reasons:
The 16" is a lot heavier, though. On the plus side, the battery lasts a lot longer.
Yeah, we have one conference room that has a 50" screen on the wall and well placed mics. A laptop runs it all. But when it’s just ‘my’ team, they grab a laptop and a table and go.
I have found that CC helps me a lot. And I know it’s mostly my problem as my hearing is bad, If it’s a big meeting in person, fgetaboutit. CC get’s me through pretty well.
Just for fun earlier, I went and looked at laptops at your screen size and resolution. I did run into a lot of 4k 15.6 inch laptops. It’s just that they were 16:9, not 16:10 like yours. Thushey were 3840x2160. rather than 3840:2400.
So maybe things won’t be so hard when you eventually upgrade.
That said, it looks like the battery is removable, so there’s always the option of finding an external charger + extra battery.
And if the problem is like the one I had with my Dell, where the charging plug on the mobo gets loose and stops working, I would suggest looking into a magsafe adapter. They help take the stress off of that plug.
My mid-2012 MacBook Air is probably going to be replaced soon. The battery doesn’t last very long, and it’s stuck on Catalina 10.15.7, which hasn’t been supported since November 30, 2022.
Definitely getting another MacBook Air - it’s for personal use only and I only use it for browsing and emails. I no longer use it for Notes or Reminders, as it doesn’t get along with my iPhone and iPad, both which are significantly newer.
I need to figure out if I can move my banking cookies - otherwise I’m going to have to call some banks to set the cookies again. Grumble.
Speaking of iPads, when I do update, I’m getting the smaller one. My husband got an iPad mini (7.9") which is much more convenient than the 9.4" iPad that I have.
Definitely staying with Apple. Hubby got into Apple in the early 1980s - he still has his first Macintosh with the signatures inside.
Black Friday’s making inroads here, but it probably won’t help me, unless I decide to get a M1 MacBook Air. Hubby wants to buy the newest one possible, to make sure it lasts as long as possible.
Speaking of battery power, time to plug this in.
My home systems are solid. But my phone (hey it’s a computer) is getting long in the tooth. I hate replacing them because each new generation is just a liiitttttllleee bit bigger.
But I know it will fail me when I need it most and am on the other side of the country.
Computers today are not like computers of the 80s and 90s and 2000s Where every year or two years was big upgrade. It seems computers today are much more mature. A computer two or three years ago you not really going to notice the update.
It mostly advice to update every 6 years if you can unless the computer still going fine than if it can last update in 8 years or so.
The Moore’s law have been slowing down and very little change now in three years unlike before where it was big change.
Got the iPad in. Initial impression is that it will work fine for everything. What’s funny is how often I keep reaching for my broken laptop and realizing the iPad will suffice. The screen is awesome, as are the speakers. I thought the 12.9” display would seem huge for a tablet but it’s nice. A surprising number of my apps don’t have an iPad version but to be fair they’re things I didn’t do on my laptop either.
Edit to add: I can’t believe I was once again caught out by Apple’s penchant for ridiculously short charge cables. They’re like Lucy with a football.
I built my desktop back in 2012. Originally with a HDD, at some point I upgraded to a 128 GB SSD, and then a 500 GB SSD. This evening I upgraded yet again to a 2 TB SSD.
I am amazed at how easy it is to clone these drives. It took about 30 minutes, and when I tried to boot from the new drive it just worked. Now transferring all of my data from the old HDD that I was using for most of my data. Having everything on a single drive is going to make backups much easier. That HDD is at least 10 years old. It works perfectly, but at that age I don’t think I really want to rely on it much longer. Now that I have fast Internet, cloud backup seems like a good choice.
With FSR, this video suggests your GPU would be fine. Your CPU is likewise just a bit below spec, but it might be workable.
Personally, if I wanted to play that game, I’d try it out for an hour or so, knowing I might return it. If it didn’t work, or if I want better graphics, I’d consider trying it out on Cloud Gaming, like with GeForce Now.
For the anti-laptop as a main computer people, like I said above, I replaced my MacPro desktop with a laptop. I run a 4K screen and a 1920x1080 screen off it in clamshell mode. Plus I have my laptop’s display if I run it with the screen up. It essentially acts as a desktop and more than outperforms my old desktop. I also have a webcam mounted on my main monitor, as well as a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Plus I can just take the thing with me if I travel to work on stuff away from home if I need to. 95% of the time, it is used as a desktop, and not a laptop, and you wouldn’t be able to tell.
The disadvantages, as I see them, are expandability and amount of ports. Even my data scientist wife has had a similar setup and has not owned an actual desktop in the near 20 years I’ve known her. The reason I went this way is because, at least with Apple, I was not happy with the current desktop options at their price points (I own the last two generations of MacPro desktops), and a laptop would give me most of the performance I need (as someone who edits a lot of photos, like 5K+ per week in busy season) and gives me portability if and when I need it. And this is a similar set-up to many of my photography colleagues. Maybe if you’re doing video editing, you’d want a desktop, but these days especially, it ain’t necessary. You can use it pretty much exactly as a desktop. If I hid the computer, you wouldn’t even know.
I rarely even turn my PC on anymore. Almost everything I ever need to do can be done from my phone.
Each to their own. My phone informs me “your screen time is up 20% over last week, you used your phone for an average of 1 minute per day!”. It mostly sits next to me while I’m at the computer — I reach for it once each morning to do 2-factor authentication then set it aside. I have reminders to prompt me to disconnect it from AC power often enough to preserve the longevity of the battery. I do take it with me if I leave the house and have any expectation of actually needing a telephone. That’s maybe twice a month.
Now if you could hook the damn thing up to an adapter and have it drive five 1920 x 1080 screens, an external keyboard, mouse, headset for Zoom and Teams, computer speakers, external hard drives, label printer, laser printer, and ethernet network, and it ran full-blown MacOS and not some pared-down version that won’t let you deal with its contents as folders and files, and you could grab it and stick it in your pocket when you go to lunch, yeah, that would be a nice device, I’d totally use that and not need “a computer” (not that the distinction would be very relevant). I assume it’s converging, still, although it’s taking a shitload longer than I’d anticipated, but the cellyphone as we know it today is still a toy, although it’s a toy that can do some impressive tricks.
Samsung phones can do this with their DeX system. Android in general can do all of that except the display. DeX adds in the display, and switches to a desktop like interface for the big screen.
The last Samsung I had was a Galaxy S8 from 2017, so it was a bit too slow and memory restricted compared to all except the lowest end computers of the time. It did work, and was an interesting novelty. For many programs, like Samsung’s browser, it was quite usable.
To me, the biggest issue was that if I need a monitor, keyboard, etc., then I may as well get a proper computer to go with it. Phones are much more capable today than they were 6 years ago, so it might be more useful.
My PC has 8 GB of RAM and 4 3.1 Ghz cores. My phone has 8 GB of RAM and 8 2.2 GHz cores. They are close enough in performance to each other to not make much of a difference. (I currently have 512 GB of storage on it, but could upgrade that to 1.75 TB for $150.)
That’s good to know. I mean, sooner or later it will make sense to make a cellphone my main computer. But for now they’re still basically where the laptop computer was when it was clearly a compromise and unable to do the work of a real computer.
Apple is likely pretty close to putting a full-on laptop CPU into a phone soon, but even then you won’t get the whole enchilada; like the iPad Pro running iOS with M-series chips because they still want to selling Macs.
I want them to. Sell me a Mac that I can put in my shirt pocket when I go for lunch, and also it should make phone calls. Running full-blown MacOS.
When I take it out of my shirt pocket I want to be able to hook it to four or five good-sized screens, a keyboard, mouse, and all the externalia that one might attach to their work or home Mac.