After many hours of research and hand-wringing, I decided to take the plunge and go back to Windows. It had the latest-generation silicon, and even with 16 gigs of RAM, the whole thing would cost roughly half the price of the MacBook Pro with weaker specs. It could be folded back into a (gigantic) tablet, and it even had a mechanical webcam kill switch for added security. It had a gorgeous 4K screen-and a touchscreen at that! It sported a pair of Thunderbolt-equipped USB-C ports, as well as a standard USB-A, a full-sized HDMI port, and an SD card slot. Most looked like relics made of cheap plastic, but there was one that immediately caught my eye: The 15.6-inch HP Spectre x360. In a bit of a daze, I wandered over to the PC laptops. And for this I was supposed to pay 4,000 bucks? I was shocked. The screen was nice, but that display hadn’t really improved much since my late-2012 model, and it was using processors and graphics cards from nearly a whole year earlier.
I hated that it had only USB-C ports, and I imagined myself in dongle hell each time I needed to connect a standard USB-A cord or an HDMI cable. The keyboard was awful-the same “butterfly switch” model that would soon become notorious-and as I tried some online typing tests in the store, the errors piled up. So I went to a Best Buy to try the latest and greatest MacBook Pro.
