Today on the 5: Despite the justified doubt in the initial announcements about Microsoft and Qualcomm's new line of ARM laptops, it appears the new machines are actually pretty good! If nothing else, that's great news for anyone who values having options.
Ozone Nightmare
A Viable Alternative
Welcome to your daily five for Thursday, June 27th, 2024. I know I've done at least one five and I've talked a couple of times, I think, on my art streams about the fact that it bothers me that there is not a real competitor within the tablet space to the Apple iPad, which I have and I use on an almost daily basis. And I love the thing, but I know that if something were to happen, if Apple were to, for whatever reason, abandon this piece of hardware or if they started doing something that screwed it up or it just became too expensive for me to afford, there's really nothing that would equate to that experience. And that has also been true in many ways in the laptop space, particularly if you're not looking for some kind of heavily, you know, like a workstation. If you're not looking for something that's really just almost a high end desktop in laptop form, a 10 pound jet engine sounding monster, you really didn't have, I would say a lot of great options when you would look in comparison to something like the Apple silicon based MacBook Air. And Microsoft and Qualcomm have been saying, oh, we're going to come out with something that's going to compete in that space for a while. I think there was a lot of very justified skepticism in it. And of course, a lot of the light on the actual hardware performance has been sucked out of the room because of all the stuff going on with recall. But the actual ARM based Qualcomm laptops have been arriving in reviewers hands. I've been reading reviews and seeing video reviews of them. And I think probably like a lot of people, I've been pretty surprised at how positive a lot of these reviews have been. Now, before I go any further, just so nobody thinks I'm going to suddenly say, now people are going to start, nobody's going to switch from Apple, they're not going to abandon the MacBook Air for these things. That's not at all what I'm even trying to get close to saying. But what I do think it's a good example of is exactly what I want in the tablet space for laptops, which is at least there appears to be something where if somebody is looking for a laptop and they say, are there any good windows alternatives? I'd like something like the MacBook Air, but I don't want to use macOS, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for people to say. I've said many times, I still work within both windows and Mac almost equally. I find both of them have their strengths and both of them have severe weaknesses. So, for me, it's very easy to just kind of go back and forth, but I know a lot of people do not want to put that kind of effort because they're not doing enough to justify it. I'm doing more than most people are on a computer. If you're just sitting there and you just want to check email, surf the web, do simple things, maybe do video calls and lightweight stuff, then you really don't need to be dancing between two OSs. But as I said, I think I'd said in a five that I recently had recommended to my mother-in-law, who's only used windows for most of her life up until now, her Dell machine, her Dell laptop was running like garbage. It sounded like it was about to launch itself into the air. It's only got drones sometimes just trying to start up. And I said, "Well, let's just move you to macOS. You already have an iPhone. It's going to be easy because the ecosystem is there for you." And she's been delighted with it. That was easy for her, trying to get my mother to do that. My mother is just really stuck with windows. She's familiar with it. She knows how it works. And I don't know that I could get her to use macOS. And she also has a Dell laptop. And I'm pretty sure it runs probably about as badly as my mother-in-laws did. So would it be nice to be able to say to her if she's ready for a refresh? Here's something that will not sound really loud that will operate in many ways with the benefits of what a MacBook Air, if you were in the Apple ecosystem would. Yes, that's great. It's good to have alternatives for people. It's good to have options and choices. Again, this is not going to get anybody to abandon macOS. Or I guess the only people that it might are people who are really annoyed with it that maybe have been using it grudgingly because they were somehow aware that they were really good laptops, but they never liked the OS. I suppose those people probably do exist, but I can't imagine there's too many of them. Not enough for Apple to be really concerned about or Windows to be ready to welcome by the thousands, but still just to see that there is some other lap, some other piece of hardware that can compete in a space that many people have basically said that Apple was dominant in. Again, there's an iPad analog here. That's beneficial. That's good. It at least keeps Apple aware. I don't think it strikes any fear into the company. I don't think that they're really concerned that they're going to see any type of mass switching or a change of adoption rates and any of the stuff that they got, but it does at least keep them looking at it. It does still prove that there is a way for another company to do what they're doing, that they are not as special as they and many of their hardcore fans would have you believe that there's no way to do this unless you have total control. It's certainly easier, but based on what these people are saying, I want to see if it holds up. Obviously, these are fresh reviews. Let's see where they are in six months to a year, but initially anyway, I take this as good news, not because I think it's going to ever be any real threat to Apple, but if for no other reason that it provides another option. And in life, technology, everything, having options is always ideal later.