Meet my new laptop; you’ll hate it, just like the last one.
Techies may demand superfast, highly expandable laptops; how many of us actually need one?
You may recall that last month I treated myself to a MacBook Pro, following the untimely demise of my 12in MacBook at the hands of half a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. This might not have seemed like a controversial bit of news, but I shared it with a certain trepidation, halfexpecting a chorus of told-you-sos from certain quarters.
Because people have been telling me to ditch the MacBook from day one. “It’s a toy laptop,” declared the naysayers, both online and in the pub. “Its Core M processor is hopelessly underpowered. You can’t do any real work on it.”
Well, I’m here to say that they were dead wrong. To be sure, there are things to criticise about the MacBook – the single port for both power and peripherals always felt a bit stingy, and although I rather like the ultra-low-travel keyboard, I get that it isn’t to everyone’s taste.
The processor, however, never once held me back. We all have unhappy memories of those early netbooks that took five minutes to boot and six months to end up on eBay – but today’s low-power CPUs are in a different league. On my MacBook, I would regularly open up dozens of tabs in Chrome, touch up holiday snaps in Photoshop and even render the odd video. That wasn’t exactly swift, but it was perfectly doable.
The real problem, I suspect, was simply one of perception. We all like to imagine that we need the most powerful processor on the market to cope with all our terribly important and demanding tasks. If someone tells us that we only require a lightweight CPU, it’s as if they’re calling us a lightweight. It’s instinctive to push back.
Indeed, that’s something that Intel itself has cottoned onto, and in the past year it’s wisely scrapped the maligned Core M brand; the same processors are now obliquely marketed as mere variants of its Core i5 and i7 models. I suspect that plenty of people who’d have run a mile from a Core M are now happily using “Core i7” laptops without batting an eyelid.
For my part, I’d have happily stuck with what I had. I switched chiefly because I found a refurbished MacBook Pro online for several hundred pounds less than the cost of a new MacBook – and since I’ve been known to dabble in InDesign, the bigger screen and trackpad were a bonus, too.
If I thought this would mean an end to the carping, though, I was sadly mistaken. The MacBook Pro has traditionally been the go-to laptop for professionals and creatives alike, but the current design has had, shall we say, a mixed reception. I’m not talking about the Touch Bar – a creditable bit of blue-sky thinking that’s just too expensive to take seriously. No, the real drama is about the move to USB-C.
To be fair, Apple has gone rather gung-ho on the transition. My wife has a 2015 MacBook Pro, and dotted around its sides you’ll find an SD card reader, a full-sized HDMI socket, twin USB 3 ports, a pair of Thunderbolt connectors, a headphone socket and Apple’s patented MagSafe power connector. On mine, there are two USB-C sockets, a 3.5mm jack socket… and that’s your lot.
Is this a problem? For me, no. These days, everything I might conceivably want to connect – be it a mouse, a printer, a camera or a TV – can be reached wirelessly. On the rare occasion that I need to copy something onto a flash drive or an external hard disk, I just plug it into my NAS drive and open it up over Wi-Fi. Frankly, the second USB port feels like overkill.
Yet not everyone shares this view. I recently came across a Reddit discussion in which the modern MacBook Pro’s minimal set of physical ports was held up as proof in itself that Apple has lost its way. To be fair, I do think it was a mistake to drop the old MagSafe connector; I appreciate the conceptual elegance of having one universal connector for absolutely everything, but that starts to lose its lustre the third time you trip over the power cable.
This was somewhat tangential to the discussion, however. Most of the outrage focused on the unconscionable inconvenience of having to use one sort of USB port rather than another. I confess that I couldn’t resist stepping in to point out that, if you live and work in a moderately up to date environment, the issue is somewhere between small and non-existent.
Alas, my arguments did not carry the day. The consensus appears to be that a laptop is entirely useless unless you can plug multiple monitors, external hard disks, Ethernet adapters and so forth directly into its chassis. I do find myself wondering how many people genuinely use all these connectors on a regular basis. But as with the MacBook, that’s not really the point: it’s all about self-image. Two little ports might be fine for you, but don’t you dare suggest that it’s enough for me.
I’ve no regrets. My old MacBook Air lasted me for six years, and I’m optimistic that the MacBook Pro will be with me for a similar period (assuming it doesn’t meet the same alcoholic fate as its predecessor). I can only imagine how useless and outdated those old physical connectors will seem by then.
Meanwhile, having fewer, smaller ports means the laptop itself can be that much more portable – it’s more compact than the wife’s, and noticeably lighter – and that makes me happy every time I slip it into my satchel. Mock me all you like: frankly, I can’t wait for the day when I can buy a laptop with no external connectors at all.
We like to imagine that we need the most powerful processor on the market to cope with all our terribly important tasks