Why would I want to rip my screen from my keyboard? And where can I buy a normal laptop now?
I can think of exactly zero reasons for a 2 in 1 laptop.
I went laptop shopping this week and became horribly depressed. Not only were the laptops so much more expensive than I was expecting, and if you feel the same, check out this article on the best laptops under $400 to save you some money, but every laptop I came across detached from the keyboard! Where did someone get the idea that I really want to take my computer screen and walk around with it separately from my keyboard? Because I really don't. In fact, I'm quite sure this would lead to me losing my keyboard and being left with a very awkwardly large, ill-equipped iPad imitation. This may make your 2 in 1 harder to keep secure than a regular laptop, why not find more information about business IT security with information from The Final Step!
I write. I type. Like most people who use computers for work, I spend my time typing emails and typing documents, and maybe researching some things on the Internet. Here's how simple my needs are. I do 80 percent of my writing in Windows NOTEPAD. When money is involved, I use a spreadsheet. I need a computer that is good for typing. You know, like old computers, before somebody got the idea that the things I want to do with a computer should be buried under huge colorful boxes that merely act as a speedbump to my getting things done.
I HATE Windows Boxes (Windows 8, etc). And by the way, I actually really like Microsoft's Surface...for what it is. I wouldn't in a million years pull out one of those if I had serious work to do.
Last year, when I set out on my own, I raced to the store to buy what seemed like one of the final Windows 7 laptops available. It's been a year, and as you know, all Windows machines suffer from a kind of entropy that means they grow old and slow very quickly. In Microsoft years, my new laptop is probably about 85 now and ready for the pile of other old laptops in the corner of my basement. (How do I know? Notepad is even slowed down now.) One radical step is to reset the thing to factory settings and spend a week re-installing all the patches and software I use now. I'd rather go to the dentist. Plus, where is my Microsoft Office product key?! So I must consider buying a new computer.
As for why that's depressing, the options are all bad, thanks to Microsoft.
* Yes, I can still get a Windows 7 laptop, but that feels more and more like the laptop equivalent of rooting a phone. Go ahead, get the old model, but you are on your own. And your going to get old hardware, less support, and you know, pretty soon it might go the way of Windows XP.....
* Yes I can get a Windows Boxes laptop and keep hitting desktop view. But the thing is engineered to nudge me back to the boxes, which I know eat up processing overhead and will eventually cause me trouble. Plus, most models have special hardware designed to make the swipey tablety thing cool -- after all, that's the point of Windows Boxes. None of this makes it a better thing to type on.
* Moving to a Mac is always a possibility, of course, and I'll consider it again. Models below $1,000 make this tempting. But, not unlike my fateful decision to buy Canon instead of Nikon when I was in graduate school, many other purchases I've made (Microsoft Office, for example) nudge me towards staying in the PC family. It's not easy to convert. I love my iPad for what it is. But when you are working, you don't want to think about the tool, you want to work.
* Chromebooks or some kind of Linux installation are also tempting. These machines are simple and fast. And there's a lot I can do with Google docs. But as a writer, they often cause me this nightmare: edited Word documents come back at me from editors with all kinds of markup comments (believe me, there's A LOT). These often don't play nice with non-Microsoft word processing software. So I really need Word to do my job. Like it or not, Word is easiest to operating on Microsoft's platform. Many of Microsoft's digital platforms, including things like Exchange Server, are, despite their immense capabilities, still susceptible to outages. For this reason, it might be wise to carry out some Exchange Monitoring solutions so that your important software is always working to its full capabilities.
So, what do I do? Yesterday, I spent an hour aimlessly browsing laptops on Amazon, and then visited my local electronics store and went away very sad. Damn you, Microsoft, for abandoning workers of the world and our need to type just because you fell so far behind in the tablet market and you are trying to be cool.
NOTE: Please forgive any typos. I was rushing this story out before I had to reboot my machine again.