This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about the dearth of truly great PC laptops out there, and I suspect it won’t be the last.
This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about the dearth of truly great PC laptops out there, and I suspect it won’t be the last.
I agree… I love my Macbooks for how well the hardware works, and I love how I can open up terminal and do pretty much anything I want. What I don’t like is how consumer hostile it is when it comes to being able to upgrade or repair. I also don’t like Apple’s insistence on telling me what I do and do not want in a product. According to Steve Jobs no one wants a touchscreen on their laptop, and even though he’s been dead for over a decade and the market has shown otherwise, they still don’t have a touchscreen Macbook (and if they ever do release one they’ll fawn over how innovative they are for doing so).
Anecdotally, I had a touchscreen convertible laptop before my current MacBook. I even got the pencil for it that let me draw on the screen, which I wanted to use for taking notes. The pencil sucked in practice (this was a >1000€ laptop, not much less expensive than my MacBook! maybe that’s just what I get for buying HP though.) and sooner rather than later I got an iPad for taking handwritten notes, and the touchscreen itself turned out to be a gimmick that I used in the beginning but eventually turned off.
Sometimes, they’re right. For example, kind of the reverse: people wanted floating windows on the iPad for years. I always said this would be incredibly awful to use in practice without a mouse. Now they added windows on the iPadOS 26 beta and I tested it and it was exactly as finicky as I expected it to be. Hopefully they’ll still polish it so that it’s at least as good to use as the old side-by-side view (which they unfortunately removed), but this really isn’t it right now.
People might want a device with all the input methods and the most versatile multitasking, but I don’t think this is reasonably doable in a way that’s as polished as devices built with a main input method and UI purpose-built for that input method. In the past I might have said that Apple are the only people that could do this correctly, and only by investing a significant amount of resources, but after the iPadOS 26 situation… oof.
I have had touchscreen laptops at work, and I’ve had touchscreen chromebooks for personal use and I love the option of the touchscreen, but it isn’t something I use exclusively. Sometimes, while typing it’s much easier and faster to ‘click’ on a link, or new field, by tapping my screen rather than grabbing my mouse or going to a touchpad. I agree that trying to use the screen on a laptop while it is in ‘laptop mode’ is difficult, but there is a use case where it’s preferred, and I end up with fingerprints on my non-touchscreen screens when I forget which computer I’m on.
Yeah using it for quick tapping something on the screen I can see being faster than the touchpad. I don’t know if it’s worth the fingerprints on the display though personally :^)
$500 option
Oh, it’ll be more than that!