iPhone X went on sale earlier this month. I feel ashamed of myself that I wasn\u2019t able to get it on the first day this time. Anyway iPhone X promises the future of smartphones. In fact \u201cthe future\u201d has long been Apple\u2019s selling point for its products. Whether such promise is fulfilled is a story for another time. But today I\u2019m looking into the past. <\/p>\n
You see, I\u2019m tired of my old iPad Air 2. Earlier this year I praised it<\/a>, but I\u2019m 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<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s not a portable machine per se. A MacBook is.<\/p>\n Yes, it\u2019s incapable in so many ways. There\u2019s only one port; it doesn\u2019t have a huge screen; it\u2019s 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\u2019s the reason I decided to buy a 2017 MacBook four whole months after its release date. I badly need a real portable laptop now. <\/p>\n What about my old MBP then? I\u2019m keeping it. It still has a terrific screen, and I bet its performance is still better than the MacBook\u2019s (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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" iPhone X went on sale earlier this month. I feel ashamed of myself that I wasn\u2019t able to get it on the first day this time. Anyway iPhone X promises the future of smartphones. In fact \u201cthe future\u201d has long … Continue reading