Do I need a laptop?

Posted on September 23, 2023

I haven’t opened my personal laptop in 2 weeks. And the reason I had to open my laptop is to write blog posts.

I have been happy performing my every day tasks of browsing and consuming media on my iPad Mini. And in the 2 weeks of using the mini, I have actually come to regret not going for the iPad Pro, since it has the ability to connect a keyboard.

Things I need my laptop for

  1. Writing and posting new blog posts. And in this 2 weeks, migrating the blog over to wordpress has crossed my mind on multiple occassions because it would allow me to pretty much perform all of my tasks on the iPad. The issue with this, is using wordpress would cost and that isn’t even the issue, $4 is reasonable to not worry about hosting but the problem is this particular tier doesn’t support bringing your own domain. In order to that you need to get on the $8/month tier for 13GB storage vs the free tier of firebase I am currently using.
  2. Leaning Haskell & Elixir I need an interactive compiler for my learning. There are alot of online playgrounds that I think I can get away with not having it run locally for my learning purposes.
  3. Working on my personal projects This is probably the only real usecase for actually needing a laptop. But even then at the moment I don’t really have anything that I am working on so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
  4. Editing Photos This is a forced reason, since it has been a while since I shot photos on my DSLR and edited them on my laptop.

Now, do I need Macbook Air?

I have been itching to replace my thinkpad x1 extreme gen 1 upgraded to 32G ram for a Macbook Air to complete my move to the Apple eco-system.

The reasons for that is the battery life, how silent the M1&M2 chips are and more than anything MacOS has all the productivity tools I currently use and would be in sync through iCloud. It might sound silly but I really like the passsword being synced across all my devices.

But the 2 weeks of just using the ipad mini has made me realize that I could probably hold on to my Thinkpad for longer till its completely ready to give up. But it is also tempting me to upgrade to newer iPad pro(hopefully when it releases next year).