Moving on from my post from yesterday, talking about missing netbooks, I realized just how phenomenal our modern laptop world is right now. Basically, since 2020, we have had an influx of new laptop technology that has made the space so much better.
First, it has been the chip revolution. Starting with the Asus Zephyrus G14/15 in 2020, it put the performant AMD Ryzen chips and a GPU inside a laptop that was thin and stylish. No more of those gaming laptops like in the photo above. This was the laptop of 2020. It had good battery life, was performant, and was at an attainable price—something that would continue on with Apple's laptops.
Apple Silicon is probably (in my opinion) one of the most exciting things to come out of Apple in a long time. It has made laptops that are absolute units, with power rivaling desktops and battery life making you question if a chip was inside the computer at all. The new M-series MacBook Pros and Airs create a laptop so fantastic it is hard to recommend anything else to someone who is not a gamer or cannot use macOS.
Snapdragon has also hopped onto the laptop train and unveiled its Snapdragon X line of chips. Now Windows laptops are getting to feel the glory of what Apple brought to the Mac. Apple Silicon slightly beats it out overall in my opinion, but at what point does it matter? This is a chip providing an incredible new platform to laptops that are not made by Apple.
Finally, let’s not forget Framework, the laptop maker pushing right-to-repair like no one else in the industry. It started with the Framework 13, allowing you to upgrade your computer and have customizable ports, then the Framework 16, allowing you to have an upgradeable GPU. Now we have the Framework 12, a repairable 2-in-1 laptop. They just keep going, and they do not show signs of slowing down.
So, in summary, laptops have become more powerful, have way better battery life, and competition is fantastic. I did not even go over things like OLED and MiniLED displays taking over, or handheld gaming and how it is improving the laptop market.
My last laptop before my MacBook Pro M1 was a Lenovo Ideapad. It had a two-core processor and a little tiny AMD GPU. It did its job, but like pretty much every laptop at the time, it had okay battery life and okay performance. Now I can buy a $700 Snapdragon laptop that could outlive that laptop's battery by 5x and have a processor with quadruple the core count. Let’s just say things are changing.
I wrote this to point out it is not always doom and gloom in the tech world; in some ways, we are living in very exciting times.