JEREMY LAIRD, CONTRIBUTOR

Want to experience the future of PC laptops? Try a MacBook Air.

Solid state laptops

Portable PCs with moving parts

FIRST, A TERRIBLE confession. My daily driver is not a PC. It’s a Mac. But before you gather the pitchforks, hear me out. For starters, my main fun rig is, of course, a powerful desktop PC. I also use a laptop PC to drive my home cinema.

The Mac really only gets used for web browsing and text editing, plus some casual content creation. But the main reason it’s a Mac is because it needs to be portable. I want to be able to pick it off my desk and take it into the office while maintaining its working state. Right now, only Apple offers a truly solid state laptop, or at least one that offers good performance and features as opposed to a glorified tablet PC running Atom cores or something similarly hideous.

I speak, of course, of the MacBook Air with Apple silicon. Once you’ve lived with a truly solid state laptop, one with not only solid state storage—which has long been the norm—but also no active cooling, fans, or pumps, every other portable seems awfully clunky. It actually makes you wonder how anyone thought it was a good idea to have laptops that screamed under load while they cooked their innards. It’s all a little bit silly.