ZDnet recently published a story on “Laptops we love” and I was struck by a number of things. They asked a number of their journalists what was their favorite machine to write on and their responses surprised me. The majority spoke up for a relatively mid-range model of laptop ($1600ish) but then confessed that they used something else; several admitted using a tablet with an addon keyboard to type in their columns for publication.
Additionally, the choice of operating system seemed rather random, some chose Windows, some IOS, and a few went with ChromeOS and one even chose Linux. I had expected professionals to choose devices with full-sized keyboards, relatively large screens (15″ or larger) and either Windows or MacOS.
Having had my eyes opened up a bit, I realized that word processing isn’t demanding of even the least powerful of modern devices. All of the current products on the market are capable of being good word processors and it is up to the user to decide the balance between portability, ease of typing, ease of viewing and a variety of other criteria.
Earlier I kind of dismissed Linux as an obvious choice for the OS of a word processor; but, with Libre and Apache office (Open Office) being native coded and compiled for various Linux versions, the user has the same quality of tools available for many kinds of word processing tasks as the user of Windows or MacOS. I have been using a Raspberry Pi400 (linux based computer) to do some graphics work, spreadsheets and yes, word processing.
So why, when asked, did the majority of those journalists suggest a mid-range of laptop? I think they and I are all caught up in the numbers game and we have forgotten the real criteria; does the machine do all the things we use, and in doing so is it fast enough that we don’t have to wait for it? Then again, it wasn’t long ago that even expensive laptops were slow enough to force us to wait on occasion; and, you can still buy those laptops. (a quick reminder, solid state storage makes a huge difference as does a good processor like the i5, the i7, Ryzen3,5, or 7 and so forth. The days of the Celeron and the i3 should be over, long over)