The Mac vs. PC war erupts again, now that Apple has unveiled MacBooks powered by its new M1 chip. We’ll help you understand the pros and cons of both platforms.
After a 15-year hiatus, the Cold War between PC and Mac began anew when Apple unveiled two new Mac laptops using its Arm-based M1 chip instead of an Intel x86 CPU. The Mac is therefore no longer a “PC” as classically defined by tracing lineage from the IBM PC 5150 running DOS and its derivative OSes. The new MacBooks are computers you use personally, they are not PCs. Is that just semantics, or does it really matter? Before you click that “buy now” button, we’ll help you understand just what you’re getting into if you choose a new Mac over a traditional PC. We had high hopes for the new MacBook—so many hopes that we actually made a list of items Apple needed to copy from Windows laptops. Instead what we got was mostly the same old shell wrapped around some new guts. Those hopes are still worth spelling out for people who can’t believe you can’t get them on a Mac. Things like… If you don’t believe in having touch on your laptop, you probably should fish that BlackBerry out of your pocket. If, however, you understand that touchscreens and pens are actually a thing today, then your best choice is to get a PC laptop instead of that MacBook. The Lenovo Yoga 5G’s 360-degree hinge means it can do this. Can the MacBook? Nope (and it doesn’t have 5G either!). While clamshell laptops will always have their place, the 360-degree hinges you’ll see on convertible laptops are far more versatile. You can even spin it into a tablet to sign a document. While the convertible design typically comes with a small performance cost, it’s so versatile, it’s hard to go back to a small clamshell-only laptop afterward. Oh yeah, that cool facial recognition feature? That’s a Windows PC thing.
