Three years on, frustrations were starting to arise. The battery was on its way out and the laptop would hibernate without warning, the wi-fi would only occasionally reconnect when waking up (not to mention it was very slow), the touchpad's click mechanism had given up, and it had suffered the traditional Windows lethargy that comes with having an old installation. I had mostly moved away from using a laptop towards using my iPad Mini, combined with a Brydge keyboard, which turned the little tablet into a frankly awesome almost-laptop that would get jealous and inquiring glances when I used it at conferences.
My needs were pretty straightforward: minimal startup time; wi-fi that works; enough storage that I don't have to worry about constantly cleaning out the disk; at least a full-HD screen (I like to squeeze as much on screen as I can to make the most of my eyes while they still work); as small as possible; and it should run iTunes to allow me to back up my phone. (That last point rules out installing Linux - ironically, it's an Apple product that's kept me using Windows all these years.)
The first incredible thing I noticed is that most laptops these days - at least those at the lower end of the market - still have 1366x768 screens, no matter how big the screen size. A whole range of otherwise respectable laptops might as well be from the dark ages. Laptops have bigger screens than phones and tablets, so they should have a higher screen resolution than phones and tablets. It's 2017.
In the last few years, a new category of device has taken hold: the 2-in-1, or convertible tablet. They take various forms, and among the best exponents of these are the little-known Chinese companies like Chuwi, producing small, cheap but well-built Atom-powered tablets. They're neat and well-built and have fantastic screens, but are so very slow: rather than having a full-blown SSD, their solid state eMMC memory performs a little better than an old-fangled hard drive, but not by much. Whilst there are more powerful 2-in-1 devices available like Microsoft's Surface series, I should have mentioned another requirement: a laptop should actually be a laptop; it should be usable on a lap. I'd love to hear from anyone who actually thinks depending on a kickstand is a good idea. I don't believe anyone bought a Surface with a keyboard without being disappointed with the compromise that they can't actually use it as a laptop.
I looked long and hard through every single Windows device that vaguely fulfilled my requirements, but to me they are all a risk: the wi-fi will probably still not work properly; it'll be impossible to find out how well it sleeps and resumes; and besides, for me Windows was always a compromise. For the last three years the only thing that's kept me on Windows is iTunes (I need to back up my iPhone and transfer music to it). Increasingly aggressive updates and unacceptable "telemetry" that had to be disabled wore me down. I'd figured that I could disable all that - even on Windows 10 - but you can't test out sleep mode when you look at the demo models in a shop, and they'll be locked down so you can't see how they perform with wi-fi.
I've always seen Apple devices as very expensive. But in the last few years, Windows devices have more than caught up in price - although their longevity has yet to be proven, whereas the number of people using years-old Macbooks shows that they have a reliability previously only associated with the near-indestructible ThinkPad. Nonetheless, I can't bring myself to spend so much on a device that, ultimately, doesn't actually do any more than a cheap computer - no matter how much better it does it. But, from my experience with my iPad and knowledge from my Apple-toting friends, Apple knows how to make devices that can go into an almost zero-energy sleep mode, wake up quickly and connect to wi-fi automatically.
So, in the end, my new laptop turned out to be older than my old laptop. I bought a first-generation Retina Macbook Pro - top of the range in its day almost five years ago, and still comfortably trouncing every new laptop in its price range in terms of specifications (except perhaps battery life). Fact is, processors haven't actually got any quicker in the last five years, they just consume less energy than they used to. In fact, a brand new Macbook Pro isn't much quicker than its five-year-old predecessor. A newer model would have given me 802.11ac wi-fi, but even the late-2012 model I have can make use of the 5GHz wireless bands, and unless your router has gigabit Ethernet, it's still faster than a wired connection.
I can't help concluding that Apple's biggest competitor is older Apple devices. (This holds true for their phones too: whilst mobile processors are getting faster, there's nothing you can do on an iPhone 7 that you couldn't do on a three-year-old 5S.) I'm looking at my "new" five-year-old laptop and, aside from a couple of scratches, I honestly can't see any signs of use. Just about any other laptop would have marks on the screen where the keys rubbed against it while it was closed, the touchpad would be worn smooth from use and the coating would have worn off the edges of the plastic case. Even ThinkPads show such signs after as little as half a year.
My compromise was to accept having to learn a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts and accept a different set of flaws (like the fact that application windows are kind of hard to move around without an app like Spectacle, which shatters the illusion of "it just works"). I haven't bothered installing Firefox, my usual browser of choice, since Safari supports uBlock Origin. And although it's a little bigger than I'd have liked, it fits snugly into a pocket that usually carries my work-provided ThinkPad. Give me a few months and I'll probably find a whole new bunch of things to be annoyed with. But, for now at least, I'm wondering why I was so late to the game. I guess it's easy to stick with flaws that you've figured out how to deal with.
tl;dr: just get over your doubts and buy a Mac. If you think Macs are too expensive, buy a used one that's cheaper. You probably won't regret it - I haven't yet.
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