View from the Labs
Let’s not pretend that pricey, high-end laptops aren’t tempting – but let’s also not pretend that we need them
I’ve always been a firm believer in the maxim that you get what you pay for. For that reason, I’ve tended to insist on stumping up for a premium laptop: my current workhorse is a Microsoft Surface Laptop, and before that I had an Apple MacBook Pro. Both of them cost a fair bit more than £800.
Yet after spending a few weeks with the 11 contenders in this month’s Labs, I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve been a bit of a chump. You see, I am one of those people who imagines that they need a ten-hour battery life, a huge SSD and a colouraccurate display – or, at least, who bases their purchasing decisions on the apprehension that I might need those things one day.
However, when I look at how I actually use my laptop, that’s obviously a fantasy. In the real world, it’s vanishingly rare that I need to work for more than three hours away from a power socket. Yes, my laptop’s SSD is almost full, but buying a larger one would only encourage me to hoard even more outdated ISOs and uncompressed copies of the PC Pro podcast. And as for a colour-accurate panel, who am I kidding? Do I need a cinema-grade display to enjoy the little videos that pop up on Twitter?
Needless to say, I’m not suggesting for a second that those things aren’t valuable – to certain people. And I won’t pretend that I don’t enjoy the feel, the design and the (perhaps imaginary) social cachet of a luxury machine. However, in my entire personal and professional lives so far, every practical demand I have ever asked of a laptop would have been perfectly well answered by one of this month’s sub-£800 models. It’s food for thought.
That’s not the only way in which this month’s Labs has been an eye-opener. It’s no secret that I’ve always thought that Windows on a tablet was a stupid, unworkable idea. Yet my experiences this month have started to bring me around. For one thing, I have to admit that the transition from laptop to tablet is nowadays neat and effortless enough that you can happily hop into tablet mode for the one or two apps where it makes sense, then switch back to the land of desktop apps in an instant.
More to the point, it’s apparent that choosing a modern laptop with a tablet option doesn’t have to wreck the budget: the £699 HP Pavilion x360 is proof of that. So if you’re on the fence about touch – or even a stubborn sceptic like me – you’ve nothing to lose by taking another look. My colleagues here at PC Pro frequently mention how convenient they find it to use a stylus to interactively edit and annotate the pages you see before you, and I have to admit it sounds a bit niftier than my own somewhat low-tech method, which involves a printer, a red pen and a scanner.
This isn’t to say that you should steer clear of regular laptops, though, as those certainly still have their place. However, it all comes back round to the central message of this month’s Labs: if you’re clear about what you want, you can get a lot more than you might have expected for your money.
“You can hop into tablet mode for the one or two apps where it makes sense, then switch back to the land of desktop apps”