iPhone X went on sale earlier this month. I feel ashamed of myself that I wasn’t able to get it on the first day this time. Anyway iPhone X promises the future of smartphones. In fact “the future” has long been Apple’s selling point for its products. Whether such promise is fulfilled is a story for another time. But today I’m looking into the past.

You see, I’m tired of my old iPad Air 2. Earlier this year I praised it, but I’m afraid those viewpoints became obsolete as my computing needs changed. When I was a student, I required ultimate portability from a machine that can read PDFs. My old iPad 2, New iPad and later iPad Air 2 served that purpose so well. But at that time I already noticed something was missing: the word processing power and website rendition on the iPad still lagged behind that of a formal Mac. I just let go because reading ebooks was top priority.

But today my mobile computing needs changed. I need a machine to render websites accurately; I need precision in note-taking; I occasionally need serious photo editing on a portable machine. A top-configured MacBook Pro is only a portable machine at home, but it’s not a portable machine per se. A MacBook is.

Yes, it’s incapable in so many ways. There’s only one port; it doesn’t have a huge screen; it’s fanless so the CPU is doomed from the beginning. But on the other hand it has so much more advantages over the iPad: a bigger screen, a real keyboard, the ability to run Lightroom (Lightroom for iPad is a joke), a real file system, etc.. That’s the reason I decided to buy a 2017 MacBook four whole months after its release date. I badly need a real portable laptop now.

What about my old MBP then? I’m keeping it. It still has a terrific screen, and I bet its performance is still better than the MacBook’s (remember I need to edit 4K videos these days). By choosing a MacBook over an iPad Pro, I announce defeat in the transition into the future of computing. But who says I have given up entirely? Who says the Mac cannot be the future of computing?