Why I Did Not Buy A MacBook Air

Certainly, I am getting to the point of needing a new Mac. My main system is a 2010 iMac that my son and I resurrected from the dead in 2013 a few Thanksgivings ago. My backup system is a MacMini which I purchased in January 2013 when my iMac was in the throes of its death. I have not had a Mac laptop since my white plastic MacBook died in the summer of 2012.  The Apple Store just told me my iMac with an I5 processor and 16GB of RAM will not run Mojave, the latest version of the Apple operating system.

The system that I considered replacing with a new MacBook is my faithful, original Lenovo Yoga with 4GBs of RAM and a 64GB SSD, touchscreen and an I5 processor. I paid $999 plus taxes for it on Black Friday 2012. It has stayed on the kitchen counter or traveled with me since I bought it. I have never had a problem with it, but I have to run a tight ship to stay within its limitations and it will only connect to 2G WiFi. I sometimes used it as a tablet at night when browsing the web.

It makes sense to have a traveling Mac laptop since I work for one of the few companies out there that use Macs on an everyday basis. We actually use Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.  However, I do not come to this purchasing decision without a bias. I starting selling Apple Computers in 1982 for a reseller and went to work for Apple in November 1984.  When I finished my career at Apple's choice almost twenty years later in July 2004,  my position at Apple was the director of federal sales. From 2000 to 2004 my federal team continuously preached about Apple's embrace of open standards in OSX. It was a message well received in the federal market as we tripled sales year after year with an incredibly small team given the US federal IT market is the world's largest market.  It is easy to say that for over two decades Apple was at the center of our world.

My last ten years at Apple also coincided with Apple's last efforts to be price competitive.  Many of those years Apple lived by the mantra that each year they should introduce new products at the same price point but with more features and power. Without giving away the rest of my story, I can still say that I am not alone in saying that those days of Apple attempting to be competitively priced are long gone.

Before detailing my thought process on my computer purchase, a little more current technology context will be useful.

In December 2014, my son and I bought my wife a Toshiba Chromebook. She had been using a Windows laptop since January 2010 when I forced her to give up her 12" Aluminum Powerbook G4. She wanted something with better battery life that did not weigh as much as her 2010 I5 HP.  We looked at the current MacBook Air and Chromebooks.  For what she wanted to do, email and browse the web, a Chromebook that cost $800 less than the $1,000 plus MacBook Air price tag seemed a better choice. She is still using that Toshiba Chromebook today. Her home business 2010 HP Windows laptop was retired in the summer of 2017 after seven and one-half years of service. It was still working but had gotten too slow.  She got a Lenovo 720 I5 with 8GBs of RAM, 256GB SSD and fingerprint reader. The cost was under $800. The total cost for both of her current computers is around $1,000.

Last year I replaced my two-years-old Windows desktop with an HP Envy with 16GB, 500GB SSD, 8th generation I7, GeForce MX-150, and 3840 x 2160 touchscreen display. The price was $1099 plus tax and since I bought it at Costco, it came with a two-year warranty. It stays upstairs in my office hooked up to a nice Dell monitor. I do almost all of my photo work on it now. I now use Adobe's products for most of that work. It also has my GPS software, Expert GPS, another product called GeoPhoto, WonderShare Filmora for video, and a product called XnView that I use for browsing photos.  I also have on it the Microsoft Office Suite and an Amazon product used for Kindle books. When we evacuated during Hurricane Florence, it did travel with me. While using it side by side with my old Lenovo Yoga, I got a good taste of the difference between 2G and 5G WiFi.  The HP Envy is usually on my wired Ethernet network in my office.

My work iMac does have a few programs that I use personally, Pixelmator, BBEdit, Marked 2, and Fetch. There is another factor that matters in my decision, I have been an Android smartphone user since March of 2010. I recently upgraded my four-plus-year-old Motorola Droid Turbo to a Google Pixel 2XL. We also switched to Google Project Fi from Verizon and our phone bill dropped from around $100 to about $50 per month while going from my Droid and a flip phone to two smartphones. Somehow Verizon had me using three to four Gigs of data monthly. Since switching to Fi, we have barely broken one Gig of data per month for the two of us.  I also have a repurposed Lenovo I5 with a 500 GB SSD. It runs a version of Ubuntu Linux.

Beyond it is nice to have a MacBook Air to travel with for business, the most important thing for this purchase is for it to meet my everyday needs. That is especially true since I am paying for it with my money. Those daily needs include checking my emails (several accounts), doing some light photography work, browsing the web to read the morning news, ordering a few things from Amazon, and looking at maps and weather. I should mention that my travels are limited and I usually only get away four or five times a year. Usually, only one or two of those are business trips.

I was in no rush to make this decision until I saw the Black Friday specials on Pixelbooks. The one that caught my eye was listed for $699 with a full touchscreen, 8 GB of RAM, and 128 GB SSD. It also came with four months of free YouTube TV and 100 GBs of online storage. Almost simultaneously, I saw that the old MacBook Air was being offered for $799 at Best Buy. I consulted my son who is even geekier than me and read a few articles including this one, 10 Reasons Why I Chose the Google Pixelbook Over a MacBook. It was written back in August when the Pixelbook and the old MacBook were priced essentially the same.

One of the key points that I got from the article was that Pixelbooks now run Android apps and can run Linux apps. While I doubt I will ever run Linux apps on a Pixelbook, I can easily see me running Slack, Bluemail, and a few other Android apps. My son advised sticking with Windows, but I felt comfortable trying the Pixelbook.

Wednesday before Black Friday, I texted a friend who works at Best Buy to confirm they had a Pixelbook in inventory and then headed down shortly after getting confirmation. It took just a few minutes to get the Pixelbook up and running at home. I think it is the best laptop I have used since the Titanium Power Book.

So what do I find so great about the Pixelbook?

1. It is instantly on when I open the cover
2. The battery life is great.  I usually get a couple of days between chargings.
3. My Android apps do work as advertised.
4. It took me less than a day to adapt my morning routine from Windows 10 to the Pixelbook
5. I love the touch screen.  I think it makes browsing even easier and more natural. The screen itself has outstanding resolution and type is very clear.
6. The computer is very fast and responsive.
7. The backlit keys are great
8. The touchpad works very well
9. It has a great keyboard
10. It is a perfect streaming companion with YouTube TV and Chromecast

The price is definitely right. I have not seen a computer with this build quality available at the $699 price point.  My wife loves the way our kitchen counter looks now compared to how it looked with the Lenovo Yoga and its components.

So what has not worked so far?  I have not been able to connect to my Synology NAS. It is not a huge deal since I am usually dropping screen captures from the downstairs computer to the NAS. Now I just copy them to a folder on my 100+ GB Google drive and then drop them on the NAS from one of my office computers. It is an extra step but a minor.  Most people don't have their own NAS anyway.

My biggest surprise has been how well minor photo image editing and resizing works on the Pixelbook.

Did the MacBook Air have a chance? If the new MacBook Air had been priced at $999 instead of $1,199, I would have looked at it seriously.

At one time when Apple's products were a real cut above the build quality of other computers. Maybe then there was some justification for charging more.  Today, with many of the same components, Apple charges more just because they can.  Apple has become the computer maker for those who like to pay more for their computers. Apple has also become the computer maker that loves trapping users in its increasingly proprietary world.

Not long ago I had to move my Dymo LabelWriter to my Windows desktop. Somehow Apple's address book no longer works with the LabelWriter. Regrettably, iPhoto and iMovie are no longer programs that I use. In contrast, Google Photos has become a valued partner in my photography.

I am not a fan of Google's lack of privacy but if I have the need, I have an email account where I can turn on encryption with a click.  When I have a problem in Pages or Numbers, I can almost never find the answer on the web.  Similar problems in Word or Excel can be solved in seconds.  When you add all this to the pricing, going with the Pixelbook was not a hard decision. That said, sometimes Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft all deserve a critical eye for how much power they wield.

Like I predicted long ago, high pricing and the Chromebook have killed Apple in the education market. Raising the price of the entry-level MacMini from $499 to $799 and changing the processor from I5 to I3 is not going to help Apple expand their market. I suspect Apple is just very happy with their 13-14% of the market that seems willing to pay whatever Apple asks. It will be interesting to see if all the Chromebook kids fall for iPhones or go towards Android/Chrome devices when they have to use their own money. Apple's recent pricing actions will push those of us who are price sensitive farther away from the platform.

As to my decision, yours might be different if you are immersed in the Apple world and happy about it. That years-ago decision to go to Android for GPS and mapping reasons might have been a fork in my computer world. People who went with iPhone are happy with it as far as I can tell. That being the case, there is no reason to rock your boat if you like where it has taken you.

Comments

[doug]

Comparing a chrome book to a MacBook is like comparing an iPad to a windows laptop, because a chrome book is more like an iPad than a mac or windows laptop.

The 9.7" 128gb iPad with a Logitech keyboard and crayon give you a serious competitor for most things at a price of under $550 ($399+50 kb +70 crayon).

I'll grant you the lack of a mouse makes certain tasks require some re-learning but the quality of the hardware and the availability of Applications (web apps and iOS apps) is very similar.

Note: I'm with you that Apple under Tim is pushing the price limits and I hope they step it back soon or it will seriously hurt the companies future. Maybe an A series laptop will make you look back? Maybe not!

[ocracokewaves]

I think you would probably agree more with me if you actually tried the Pixelbook's keyboard. It is outstanding as is the Pixelbook hardware. I have yet to use it as a tablet so comparing it to an iPad is a stretch for me. My tablet use will be less than 5%. I know an iPad is certainly much better than my original Kindle Fire, but I have not felt the need to have a better tablet. I wanted a real laptop with a touch screen. The iPad with a keyboard just doesn't do it for me. The Pixelbook has a 12.3-inch display with a 235ppi density which I think is perfect. Smaller would be harder on my older eyes. The Pixelbook is a real computer that does everything I want. It feels like a laptop when I carry it around and does everything my Yoga did so I feel justified in considering it a laptop not an iPad competitor. I too hope Apple backs off on the price gouging. I would also like to see them add touch screens.