I’ve had the new M2 MacBook Air for a few weeks now and I’m still quite pleased with my purchase. The build quality of this computer is phenomenal, although I still prefer the keyboard on my Magic Keyboard case for my iPad Pro over the keyboard on the MacBook Air. It’s nowhere near the questionable experience of the Butterfly Keyboard Apple put in their machines in the late 2010s, but there’s something about the keyboard that feels slightly off when compared to the iPad Pro.
I’ve mentioned before that work insists I use a Windows 10 laptop. I have this docked to a large monitor with a standalone keyboard and mouse, because I don’t really enjoy the keyboard built into the Dell ultrabook. I wish they’d given me a Lenovo ThinkPad, those keyboards are wonderful, but alas, dude you got a Dell.
The standalone keyboard I’m using for work these days is a bluetooth Microsoft keyboard and after using it for a month or two it’s starting to miss characters once in a while or slowing down to wake up for work. I was hoping the Microsoft keyboard would give a PC version of a Mac keyboard experience, and it’s not bad. The spacing feels a little cramped but it doesn’t make the noise my mechanical keyboard makes, which is good for Zoom-type meetings and the like.
I still love the keyboard on my old Lenovo ThinkPad T460s, except the CTRL and FN keys are swapped and that throws me off from time to time. Linux is still quite enjoyable, and I just updated the ThinkPad to the latest version of Fedora. It’s now running Fedora 38 with Cinnamon as the desktop of choice.
My productivity is best on the MacBook Air, and that has become my daily machine. Linux desktops are quite nice but don’t feel quite as intuitive as Mac OS when it comes to getting things done. Too many of the desktop environment choices of Linux try to be something else. I really wish someone, somewhere would come up with something completely different from the desktop experience. I was hoping the iPad Pro and iPadOS would fill that niche, but Apple is just trying to shoehorn desktop functionality into a tablet. I’m hopeful that AI will someday be able to look at a “data stream” coming into your computer and basically ask you want to do with that data. For example, you get an email suggesting dinner out with a friend. The AI should be smart enough to present a few of choices: respond to the email, open your calendar, suggest a restaurant, or make the reservation. This is where walled garden data sources don’t work well and why I always lean on my data in one app being available to data in another app.
Maybe we’ll get there before the end of this life.
