What’s my perfect laptop?

I enjoyed this blog post by Michael Harley, titled My perfect laptop, which I discovered via Mike Rockwell. It was very interesting to discover what Harley and Rockwell consider to be a great laptop and why.

My daily routine has changed in the past years, and I spend much less time working on the go, so I’m not as reliant on having a great or even perfect laptop with me when out and about. I actually think I have found my perfect desktop in the M2 Pro Mac mini I purchased in 2023. While not being as compact as the M4 Mac mini, it still retains a small footprint, which is great given how cramped and crowded my main desk is. It’s also a very reliable and very powerful machine for my, let’s say prosumer needs. Next, it’s equipped with a good mix of modern and legacy ports (2 USB‑A and 4 USB‑C/Thunderbolt ports). Finally — and this is something I can only appreciate with hindsight — I got it at a time where Mac OS was still decent. It came with Mac OS 13 Ventura preinstalled, and three years later I’m still happily running it without encountering any issue or setback. I’m still standing by my intention to upgrade it to Sonoma but not to anything newer.

Anyway, I’m not completely bound to a desk and a desktop machine, so having a perfect laptop is still something that matters to me. Over the years I’ve actually put together a small collection of what I consider very interesting portable machines, and all because I was intrigued by the idea of experiencing different operating systems’ UIs firsthand. So I have a ThinkPad 240X subnotebook from 2000 that’s running Windows 2000 Professional; a Toshiba Satellite from 2001 running Windows XP; a 2007 ThinkPad X61 Tablet running Windows 7 Pro (a very cool and still somewhat compact 2‑in‑1 machine); a 2008 ThinkPad T400 running Windows 8.1 Pro; a 2015 Microsoft Surface Pro 4 running Windows 10; another Windows 10 laptop I’ll talk more about later; another couple of laptops running Windows 11; a 2008 ThinkPad X301 running a Linux distro called CrunchBangPlusPlus; and of course several Apple laptops of different vintages.

The two laptops I want to focus on to give my answer to the question What’s your perfect laptop, and why? are these:

1. 11-inch MacBook Air (mid-2013)

This is the Apple laptop closest to perfection, in my opinion. I purchased mine second-hand in late 2018, and this is how I started talking about it in a piece I wrote in January 2019:

When it arrived by post a couple of weeks ago, I joked on Twitter: Loving my new 11-inch iPad Pro!

It turns out it was only half a joke. This Mac really invites you to treat it as a pro tablet + keyboard. It’s very compact, it’s very light (1.08 kg), it’s still a thin machine by 2018 standards, it has a long-lasting battery. It’s also absolutely quiet (yes, I checked, the fan works) and it’s instant-on.

[…] It’s a mid-2013 model, with a Core i5 CPU at 1.3 GHz (turbo boost to 2.6 GHz), 4 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB SSD. The 2013 vintage means it has two USB 3 ports, a Thunderbolt port, a better graphic chip (Intel HD 5000), and that it can run the latest version of Mac OS [At the time]. I also managed to find a unit that was well taken care of: its battery is at 94% health, has a low charge cycle count, and still lasts more than eight hours on a charge. Not bad for a 5‑year-old Mac.

The first remarkable detail is that its battery has aged incredibly well. Eight years later, doing normal work on it, the battery can still last around six hours! Nothing earth-shattering compared to the performance of current laptops, but still staggering given that it’s a 13-year-old MacBook Air.

Its specs, again, are nothing to write home about nowadays, but despite the 4GB of RAM and the unexceptional CPU or graphics card, this MacBook Air handles ordinary tasks very well, and I’ve never experienced a slowdown. Granted, I’m not doing any video editing or sophisticated photo editing with it, but it can have multiple apps open and several tabs open in a browser, and tackle the load with aplomb.

If this machine had a retina display, it would be absolutely perfect. I quoted Michael Tsai back in 2019, and I’ll reiterate the quote today: Nothing that Apple makes today has close to that combination of price, power, ports, and size. I feel this to be true today as it was true seven years ago. Even software-wise things are ideal, in my opinion: this MacBook Air model can be upgraded up to Mac OS 11 Big Sur, and the last 11-inch MacBook Air (the early-2015 model) can be upgraded to Mac OS 12 Monterey. This means that a max specc’d early-2015 11-inch MacBook Air, with a 2.2GHz Core i7 CPU, 512GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, a new battery, and running Mac OS Monterey could still be a very useful Mac today even if it doesn’t have an Apple Silicon chip.

You’ll probably retort by saying that perhaps the 13-inch 2020 MacBook Air with M1 processor is an even better machine, and for many things it is. It has a retina display and a faster architecture that makes this Air still quite viable today. But — for me — it’s not as compact as the 11-inch models, and it has fewer ports.

And believe me, that compactness is an important factor. As I said in 2019, the 11-inch MacBook Air is the only instance of Apple doing ‘thin & light’ rightly. But having a MacBook this compact, combined with a regular-sized keyboard (except for the row of function keys) and with a usable-sized trackpad means that you can absolutely work in total comfort on a plane or train — the 11-inch MacBook Air is the perfect size for those cramped tray tables. I’ve just returned from a 2‑day trip to Madrid and I brought my Air with me just in case I had to do some work assignments, and turns out I had to. I could work from my train seat and from the tiny desk in my hotel room without struggling to find a comfortable position.

2. Panasonic “Let’s Note” CF-SZ6

The brochure for this 2016 laptop describes it as The world’s lightest business rugged 12.1” mobile PC and after spending quite some time with it, I’d say it’s hard to argue otherwise.

This was a chance eBay find after reading an article on Panasonic ‘Toughbooks’, rugged laptops that are often fused in bulky-looking briefcases made for use in extreme conditions. But as you can see, though this CF-SZ6 is technically part of the Toughbook family, it looks just like another regular laptop.

The reason this feels like an almost perfect laptop for me is that it possess that combination of price, power, ports and size Michael Tsai was talking about when referring to the 11-inch MacBook Air. This Panasonic has a better display (12.1″ WUXGA with 1920×1200 resolution), which is bright and clear. It comes equipped with a decent 1080p webcam, three USB 3 ports (USB‑A size), Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI and VGA video out, SD memory card slot, Bluetooth 4.1 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. My model comes with a Intel Core i5-7300U vPro CPU (2.6GHz, turbo boost up to 3.5GHz), 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, a battery that still last several hours, and all this in a package that weighs only 850 grams. You read that right. In the hand, it feels even lighter. It feels like you’re handling a dummy made for display in a computer store.

The secret to its weight is of course in the choice of building materials: plastic and magnesium alloy. The outer surface feels like one of those Sony portable CD or MiniDisc players: they look metal in photos, but the chassis is actually mostly plastic. Even flimsy-looking plastic in some cases. And yet, while not looking or feeling like premium building materials, this laptop is rugged and resilient. It’s the perfect “toss it in your backpack without a protective sleeve and go” laptop.

In use, it’s as capable as the brochure promises. It cold-boots to desktop in less than 15 seconds. And when you put it to sleep, it even has a front green light that breathes like Apple PowerBooks and MacBooks used to do! I won’t lie, I had to get accustomed to the circular trackpad at first, especially for scrolling — to scroll down you move your finger clockwise, to scroll up counter-clockwise — but it quickly made sense. It also comes with a dual Japanese/English keyboard layout, and I had to memorise the location of a few specific keys, placed differently from where I usually find them on my ThinkPads. I still have Windows 10 Pro installed, and technically the CF-SZ6 doesn’t support Windows 11, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. For now, it’s a very responsive machine I can absolutely work on when needed, and still has a lot of life in it. All in all, the best €100 I spent for a second-hand laptop, and a surprising alternative for a ThinkPad fan such as myself.