gaming laptop user meets portability (i bought a macbook)
when i first bought my laptop i wanted something powerful that could do it all. the only computer i had my hands on was the family laptop at the time and i was only able to play light indie games on it. so i wanted the most powerful laptop that i could buy for the least amount of money. i settled on buying a laptop with the specs listed below:
Processors: 12 × Intel® Core™ i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz
Memory: 16 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
Product Name: HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop 15-dk0xxx
now i don't know computers that much but i know that those were pretty good for 2021. however i did not consider one thing that was so obvious in hindsight: the ergonomics.
my back hurts
yeah so turns out buying a laptop without considering how portable it was was a terrible idea. that thing weighed a little over 2 kgs and i also had to carry it's included 200w charger (because of it's terrible battery life) that brought the total weight to closer to 3 kgs. laptops are supposed to be portable. this was the polar opposite of that.
during the first 3 years of med school i didn't really carry this thing around much. i also didn't have anything else to study on so i bought printed lecture notes and those were also really heavy. plus they were in black and white and if the lecture notes changed compared to last year, i was screwed.
should've bought a tablet sooner
at the end of my third year i bought a cheap tablet, the samsung tab s7 fe. honestly i don't know why i just didn't just buy this thing sooner. it made jotting down notes and following the lectures so much easier. i could just redownload the slides if the they changed and i could use it to read textbooks really easily.
that tablet is not the most powerful (4 gbs of ram is abysmal) but it doesn't really need to be, the only things i do on it are watching youtube videos or writing stuff on pdfs using samsung notes.
so why the macbook?
i really like my tablet but i sometimes need a laptop with a keyboard and the ability to run computer apps. i found myself not being able to go to the library to study with my friends on more than one occasion because i needed to finish up patient documents. i also started to incorporate anki into my studying routine and i needed something that could run the full desktop version of anki with all the addons.
as for why a macbook specifically it is fanless, has a really good battery life, is really light and it does not run windows. there wasn't just anything that came close to it in the current market even if i was comfortable chucking linux on it.
i also briefly considered the new macbook neo but i ideally want to use this thing well into residency and 8 gbs of ram scare me for the long term.
so how is the macbook?
i got the m4 air with the 256 gigs of storage, i only had this thing for a little over a week and i love it. i used gnome for years and i got accustomed to it's workflow. using macos like gnome is not that different. thanks to my sugar daddy suliman i got access to alcove and alfred and they are super fun (suliman also helped me a ton so kudos to him). device integration wasn't all that hard thanks to an implementation of kde connect, soduto. macos generally wasn't as locked down as i thought it was going to be.
i really like the keyboard and the trackpad is a joy to use. the only negative experience i had with the macbook was i couldn't create a new apple account for whatever reason. i solved that issue by asking a friend to make one for me. was still frustrating.
closing thoughts
if i could go back in time i'd just buy a tablet on my first year and skip on buying physical textbooks or lecture notes. i'd also wait till my 4th year (when clinicals start) to buy a slim portable laptop. these things are easier to say in hindsight though.
all things considered i'm not all that upset with my purchase of the gaming laptop. i think my thoughts are also influenced by the fact that i own a steam deck that i bought in the summer of last year. and i know what i want to play which is still indie games. turns out triple A games were never for me. i guess moral of the story is you don't always need the most powerful laptop out there. make sure you consider the drawbacks of the devices you are buying.