Last week during the Thanksgiving holiday I skillfully avoided conversations about politics (for the most part) and talked tech instead. It was easy enough to do: people were asking which new laptop to buy, whether to upgrade to an iPhone 7, what’s the best budget Android phone to get, and when Apple’s AirPods are coming out.
The latter three are pretty straightforward conversations. But laptops are a different story. As The Verge’s Dieter Bohn pointed out, it used to be that you would just tell people to go get a MacBook Air. Now, there’s a 45-minute conversation to be had about 2016’s premium laptops.
This year’s high-end laptops are feats in fine design, with thin metal bodies, liquid-looking high-resolution displays, and in some cases, gymnast-like flexibility. They have futuristic keyboards, cool stuff that has made its way from the R&D lab into an actual consumer product. They also have outdated processors, oddly positioned webcams, and an irritating lack of popular ports. Rather than it being the Year of The Perfect Laptop, 2016 has become the Year of Laptop Trade-Offs.
The 2016 MacBook Pro might best encapsulate this, with its gorgeous build, new Touch Bar, and its exclusion of regular USB, Thunderbolt, and SD card ports. The 12-inch MacBook could be considered the new MacBook Air, but it’s underpowered (also, it has only one port and it’s the limited USB Type-C variation). USB-C is the future, but that future is coming slowly, and the interim solution is for consumers to use a bunch of specialized cables and adapters in the meantime.
But MacBooks aren’t the only new laptops with trade-offs. High-end Windows laptops have gotten so good that it’s become much easier to recommend them, but some of them still come with caveats. The HP Spectre x360 is a highly rated convertible laptop with Intel’s seventh-gen processor and both USB-A and USB-C ports, but it too lacks an SD card slot and HDMI port. Lenovo’s new Yoga 910 has a gorgeous 4K display, Lenovo’s famous watchband hinge, and a fast processor. It also has a noisy, ever-running fan and an annoying keyboard, of all things. The new Surface Book is great; it’s also relatively heavy and very expensive.