Choosing the right tool for the job
If you are like me, and I hope — for your own sake — you are not, you can spend hours upon hours doing research and filling virtual shopping baskets, trying to find the best laptop, tech gadget or whatever to get into writing.
I have wasted years doing everything but writing.
Thinking I could “buy” myself into inspiration and dedication.
I couldn’t.
Following are some recommendations, based on my painful, personal, time-wasting experience, about which tools get which job done very well.
I’ll keep it all as brief as possible, to not further waste your time, but I hope there’s something you can take away from this so my struggles were at least good for some thing.
The MacBook Air has a long tradition of being a modern writer’s best friend. Low weight, small size, long battery life. Since the MacBook Air received the Apple M1 chip in 2020 it’s the best-value-for-your-money Mac (for any usecase), period. It’s plenty powerful for everything a writer would need a computer for. It’s a true powerhouse that can even handle moderate video editing and will last 10 hours+ on a single charge. Yes, there are more powerful and newer versions available. Still, this is plenty powerful for all your writing needs, the keyboard is great, the screen is great too. I recommend getting 16 GB of RAM though, because it handles heavy research with plenty of tabs open in your browser much better.
If you only get one thing to do it all, get this.
Apple long promised that the iPad “is a computer”. Still, it took quite a while to actually make that statement true. But now, in 2023 with all the improvements to the iPad line and the OS itself, with multitasking, file browsing etc. we are finally there. Many modern writers swear by the iPad. Apps like Scrivener and Pages can fill all your writing needs, it’s a convenient form factor and actually touching what you are doing or using the Apple pencil to jot down notes by hand is a very special experience many won’t give up anymore. As with the MacBook Air M1, there are more powerful versions of the…
