> THE SHIFT
MATT BOLTON talks a lot about what Apple could do better in the future, but right now he’s grateful for what it got right in the past
AFTER A DECADE of working on magazines, I recently moved to working mostly online. We cover technology of all kinds, and since people have had to isolate more it turns out a lot of folks needed to upgrade their laptops in order to work reliably from home. Like, a lot a lot.
I know a few of those people. They’d been muddling through with laptops that were five or so years old that worked fine for a bit of Netflix or online shopping but were too slow and unreliable to feel like they could work from them productively. These laptops were mostly, as you may have guessed, Windows–based.
My personal laptop at home is actually six years old and has also been much more lightly used in recent years than when I first bought it. But when it received the Bat Signal that I’d need it working at full speed it was ready, cape billowing in the wind and, of course, Apple symbol glowing on its chest. It’s the mid–2014 MacBook Pro 13–inch, and in contrast to those Windows PCs it feels as good to use now as it did then. I’ve never had a problem with it that wasn’t solved with a restart. It’s still fast thanks to Apple getting in early with flash storage, so its older processor isn’t really an issue. It holds its charge well, and the keyboard and trackpad have held up perfectly.
So while I spend plenty of time in this column griping about little things I would like Apple to do differently, this month I feel thankful for the big things it’s done right in the past. It built this machine to last — I’ve hammered it with editing and encoding videos, writing hundreds of thousands of words, taking it to any number of countries, editing more photos than your average photographer… and it shows no sign of age other than its older design.
I reviewed the new MacBook Air 13-inch recently, and felt something similar when using that machine. Now that it’s replaced the butterfly keyboard with the new Magic Keyboard, I found myself marvelling at just how usable it is. The trackpad responds with no lag or confusion about whether you’ve clicked or not — so many Windows machines get this wrong. The keyboard is full-sized with a good layout, the fingerprint sensor responds instantly, and the computer is up and ready to go.
You could give me that MacBook Air and a Windows laptop that was more powerful but the same size and weight, and I’d take the MacBook Air every time because it’s so pain–free to use. It’s certainly come to the rescue in my hour of need. It’s not flashy and is a machine that “just works”, but then superheroes aren’t in it for the praise.