In September 2022 I took a 3 week trip to the Azores to visit family members, and to have my first real vacation since the end of 2019. I wasn’t planning on taking my daily driver MacBook Air with me because I was concerned about it getting lost or damaged, but I wanted to take something with me in case I needed to do some work or to connect to anything at home. I ended up getting a Chromebook for the first time in several years, and it worked out exceptionally well, despite some minor limitations. I wanted to see if a Chromebook could actually be useful as a primary device for an extended period of time.

So, this post ended up taking a lot longer to put together than I thought it would. I am still using the same MacBook Air (M1, 2020) that I was using 16 months ago when I wrote the first post, and I am still happy with the performance and the capabilities of it. I have owned it since February 2021 and been using it as my primary machine for over 2 full years now. Enough has been written on the capabilities and performance of Apple Silicon chips, so I am just going to talk about my experiences with it.

I have written about my obsession with ARM processors and why I have wanted one in a daily driver laptop many times before on this website. It has been something that I have wanted in a laptop for a long time, but unfortunately the hardware and software options were never quite there yet. I have tried many ARM devices over the last 10 years which promised that they could be a daily driver device, or at least something close to that. I was always disappointed with those devices and I never really found something that worked reliably for me. As time went on, I realized that I really wanted an ARM-based device as my daily driver, regardless of the form factor.

It has been a rumour for many years that Apple was finally going to ditch Intel and use their own custom processors in all of their devices, the exact same ones that they have been utilizing in their iOS devices for the last few years.

I wanted to do a follow up my previous post about Windows on ARM since I have had some recent hands-on experience with this platform. I was able to obtain a Lenovo Miix 630 through a contract that I am working on and I have been using it in a daily basis for the last 2 months. I had wanted to give this platform a fair chance, and here is what I found out.

Not a lot of people realize that Windows can be used on more than just x86 and x64-based hardware. Windows NT was designed from day one to be portable on multiple hardware platforms and was supported at one time on the MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC and Itanium platforms.