Last year, while between jobs, I went overseas and needed a larger device than my iPhone 13 mini to apply for jobs. I considered getting a MacBook Air but hesitated due to the non-user-replaceable SSD and RAM. I value the opinions of Louis Rossman, who highlighted this issue, specifically mentioning a part that is related to the SSD that wears out over time. I was concerned that part as once it wears out, the Mac would become unusable as Apple doesn’t allow booting from an external drive, unlike older Macs.

I was considering getting a MacBook Air due to its good specs, affordability, and long battery life. However, I was worried about the SSD issue. So, I looked at three other options: an M1 iPad Air, the Surface Laptop, and the the ThinkPad X13s with an ARM CPU from Qualcomm. Each had its own pros and cons, and I spent weeks weighing them against each other.

The iPad Air had familiar features and improvements over my 7th generation iPad, the Surface Laptop seemed like a decent Intel laptop, and the ThinkPad’s ARM processor seemed promising because I expected good performance and battery life similar to Apple’s ARM devices.

As time went on, I ruled out the ThinkPad due to its poor performance and battery life. The only advantage it had was that a compatible version of the desktop version of Ubuntu was available for it.

Ultimately, I was torn between the Surface Laptop and the iPad Air. The deciding factor was whether I could install Linux on the Surface. I found a project on GitHub that claimed to enable full compatible, but I was hesitant as I had grown accustomed to installing Linux on desktop-class hardware without compatibility issues.

In the end, I chose the iPad Air as I was most comfortable with iOS and was inspired by Federico Viticci’s embrace of the iPad-only lifestyle.

Initially, I enjoyed using the iPad Air, despite some limitations. Eventually, certain tasks, such as multitasking and playing videos on an external monitor, proved to be challenging. Thankfully, the iPad supported Apple’s Stage Manager which allowed the iPad Air to use external monitors and provided rudimentary multi-tasking support. This wasn’t so bad at first, but when I would play video content via VLC (or the default video app) on the iPad, when connected to an external monitor, the video wouldn’t play on either the iPad’s screen or the external screen. I ended up purchasing an app that played video correctly, perhaps in small part to it using mpv as a backend.

Although the iPad met about 80% of my needs, the remaining 20% was sometimes insurmountable. For example, I was unable to run my blog’s software locally without resorting to potentially signing up for a Virtual Private Server (VPS). Additionally, at times I wanted to play old PSP games, and although PPSSPP is now available on the iOS App Store, it wasn’t at the time so I couldn’t do that or if I wanted to install Linux I couldn’t do that either, even with UTM being available on the App Store, it is limited in what can be done with virtual machines.

In the end, I felt unsatisfied with the iPad Air and regretted not choosing a laptop. This would only get worse when Qualcomm announced they were going to build ARM-based CPUs for laptop computers.