How A New MacBook Could Reinvent The Laptop
Harriet Wehrenberg
Lenovo is clearly using the release of Windows 11 as a launchpad to reinvent the IdeaPad name with two compelling new ultra-thin yet powerful notebooks. Can the IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon and IdeaPad Slim 7 Pro convince buyers to look away from other established brands in this segment and join our list of the best laptops? Let's take a look.
Although the PowerBook line had been available since 1991, the familiar metallic titanium design arrived with the PowerBook G4 in 2001. Steve Jobs intended this to be a completely reinvented PowerBook, and it delivered. From being a black and rather chunky device (a typical laptop of the late 1990s), the PowerBook suddenly became sleek and elegant. It was also one of the very first widescreen laptops available to consumers.
That's the thing, though: While USB Type-C ports will one day become industry standard, they're still uncommon enough that you will need a dongle to plug in any of your peripherals that use a full-sized USB Type-A connector. In my case, that meant I couldn't charge my phone off my laptop. I also couldn't use the USB headset I normally wear while podcasting and making voice recordings. If I did want to use my USB gadgets, I would have had to plug in a $79 adapter -- that's right, it's not even included in the box. Again, I expect USB Type-C will one day be the norm, and it's possible that your needs are simple enough that you can already live without the full-sized USB ports.
In order to achieve such a compact design, Apple went with Intel's new power-sipping Core M chips, whose 14nm design has made possible other thin and light laptops, like the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro. In addition, Apple also had to redesign the logic board, which is now 67 percent smaller than on the 11-inch Air. The result, as we've already seen, is an insanely lightweight laptop with zero fan noise, though the trade-off is that Apple couldn't use the same heavier-duty Core i5 and i7 processors that it does on the MacBook Air and Pro.
Apple also could have slimmed down the bezels around the screen to offer up some extra screen space as it did with the 16-inch MacBook Pro (13 inches can feel a little cramped in Premiere). And while Apple outfitted the MacBook Pro with high-quality mics that are good enough to replace your podcast mic in a pinch, the microphones on the Air are nothing special. They pick up a fair amount of background noise. Combined with the low-quality webcam, there's just so much grain in my Zoom calls. This would have been yet another good moment to bring Face ID to a laptop, but alas, we'll have to wait another year (at least).
Also, a laptop can almost always use more ports, and this one is no exception. You get two Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports on the left side as well as a headphone jack on the right. I complained about the lack of an SD card reader and USB-A ports on the pricier MacBook Pro, and those complaints are repeated here. I'd be happier if Apple could have at least offered an extra USB-C port on the Air. I'd rather avoid dongles as much as possible.
This little 5.5-inch 1080p screen can also act as a second monitor for your laptop. This could be useful to keep tabs on Twitter or Facebook, or just to monitor a messaging client like Slack during the workday.
In light of the new Asus dual display ZenBook that provides users with a really useful second display that could also accept pen input, the Touch Bar seemed limited by most. Whether Apple will reinvent the Touch Bar in the future with a larger display is unknown at this time.
We have been building towards this moment for the last 30 years. In 1984, we introduced the first Mac. From that moment on, nothing was going to be the same again in the computer industry. In 1991 came the first PowerBook. It put the entire power of a Mac in your backpack, revolutionizing the portable computing. In 2006, we introduced the MacBook, redefining what a laptop could be. [stage-direction: back to glowing apple logo] And today, the saga continues. [stage-direction: pause & exited crowd applauds]
One big update with this model: The much-hated Butterfly Keyboard is gone, replaced with a backlit Magic Keyboard. Plus, a Touch Bar is included in all 13-inch models. Apple's attempt to reinvent the way we control our laptops isn't the game-changer that the humble mouse was, but it's a nice addition.
The product could be as revolutionary to digital movies as Apple's iPod music player was to digital music. Both devices liberate media from the computer, allowing people to enjoy digital files without being chained to a desktop or laptop.
The pricing is understandable, given the amount of R&D these devices need. However, that cost is being passed down to the customer. Durability is bound to drop and repair costs are bound to increase. Laptops generally have a longer lifespan than phones, but the foldable revolution could affect that negatively, or at least drive the repair costs up for folks that hold on to their devices longer. There are one-time screen replacement discounts from phone makers, but with bigger laptop-size displays, the cost is bound to be driven up. A replacement is unlikely to be offered for free there.
The original Mac certainly was for a time a moneymaker for Apple, but it ended up that Windows 95 had far more impact on the world, from users to the apps industry, because Microsoft didn't just copy Apple once. Microsoft kept adapting its Windows product line to find and attract more customers and more platform partners.
Apple lost out on the computing reinvention it had ignited because it got sidetracked in delivering things people weren't going to be paying for (like OS support for crafting fancy ligatures) while failing to control the underlying technologies powering its product and delivering the value that people would actually pay for.
By 1996, Apple was already in free fall. That's a quite rapid implosion following the broad commercial introduction of Windows 95 as a "cheaper Mac" just a couple years earlier.
That fall was so rapid and so dramatic that it impressed itself in the minds of PC journalists and thinkers for decades the way that the Great Depression and WWII and Vietnam and COVID-19 all seared the life experience of the generations of people who lived through them and forever scarred how they think, act, and understand the world.
Almost another decade later, Apple was still viewed by almost everyone in tech media as the "beleaguered company that had failed," which could never again catch up and certainly even if it did would have its crown taken away, probably again by Microsoft. All of the valuable lessons of the first Macintosh were largely erased and replaced with a pure fallacy that anything that seemed to be cheaper and perhaps more "open," in the way that the Windows PC was, would "always win."
"I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good," Jobs once observed, "then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next."
At first glance, that might not seem the most eloquently pithy thing a tech visionary has said.
Yet, Apple printed out those words and emblazoned them in its original campus in a prominent location outside its first theater, in a place not only easily seen by its employees, but also by investors and the tech media it would invite to see whatever it was figuring out to be next.
When Jobs returned to Apple, his first priority was to figure out what was next for the Mac, in the perilous years after Microsoft had ripped off all of its apparent value and passed that off as its own work. The pillaging of the Mac as a product and platform by Windows 95 had been devastating for Apple as a company, economically, intellectually, and reputationally.
Yet by returning to and refining the core principles of how to be an innovator, Apple not only reinvented the Mac using NeXT's software to establish a new platform that could generate revenue and get Apple back on the right track, but subsequently could branch out into music with iTunes and iPod, then into mobile phones with iPhone. Those were not simply "two new products." They were product lines that relentlessly advanced every year.
Just three years later, Apple took the technology and techniques that got it that far to introduce iPad, revolutionizing the "tablet market," as well as erasing the supposed markets imagined for netbooks, super cheap laptop PCs, Chromebooks, convertibles and folding screen phones, and so many more half-baked product concepts that flopped out into the market without being ready, without communicating clear value, without forging effective partnerships, and without being relentlessly advanced after their version 1.0.
The outside tech world has failed to grasp why Apple became so successful. Since 2010's iPad, the Microsofts and Androids of the world have desperately tried to launch volleys of fancy new smartphones and tablets with little success. Yet even as they have repeatedly failed to snatch away Apple's crown following the model of Windows 95 (and folks, that one-time intellectual shakedown occured nearly 30 years ago), Apple has moved into building new branches.