Why a typewriter? There are so many other things it can do! I could edit video, I could edit photos, I could make music, I could make digital art, but that was true of my Windows laptop, or my iPad. I bought the MacBook Air to be a digital typewriter and it is the single best writing machine I think has yet been made.
The first joy of the MacBook air is how light it is. It is without a doubt the tiniest laptop I’ve ever used, being only a few centimetres wider and taller than its 13inch screen size. Including the rings it is literally smaller than my A4 notepad in depth and width and it’s the same height. It feels almost too small to be real.
Smaller than an A4 pad
Though a touch heavier
Yet for that it has a decent sized keyboard, near perfect, which is its second joy. I have used a keyboard with Cherry MX brown switches for many years and I like strong, tactile feedback. I was one of the few bizarre people who liked the clicky keys of the 2016 MacBook redesign – although I never used them for any significant amount of time. The new ‘Magic’ keyboard unites the definite click feeling with traditional keyboard depth providing for an extremely tactile experience. Simply the act of typing is a pleasure to the point I often simply want to type for the sake of typing. If I had a single gripe, it is that I wish the enter key was ever so slightly wider as I do, on occasion, hit the key next to enter instead. Of course this is perhaps a UK problem, with our inverted-L enter key.
Which actually brings me to my next point. As a writer who has always used Windows computers, I am used to a particular quirk of the UK’s Windows keyboards. Above the 2 key we have our speech marks “. To me there is no act so natural as hitting left shift with my little finger and 2 with my ring finger to start a line of speech. To be unable to do so would be unbearable, I would send the laptop back. Already I had tried short bursts of typing with “ in the incorrect position using my iPad. I knew it would not be sustainable for long periods of time.
In comes MacOS to save the day. MacOS implements alternative keyboards extremely easily and people have done all kinds of alternative keyboards for specialty purposes, such as one which outputs International Phonetic Alphabets. The free application Ukulele allows for easy customisation of the keyboard but thankfully someone has already done the hard work and created a .keyboard file for British PC users, putting “ on 2, # ~ next to enter, and `¬ next to the number 1.
This might sound petty but for a writer the keyboard is everything. By using this custom keyboard layout I have essentially sunk into a comfortable chair for my fingers. And meant that I can confuse and frustrate anyone who ever borrows this laptop!
And they could use it for a very long time if they did. The battery life is extremely high. I am used to Windows laptops with good battery life getting five or six hours of light use. Word processing, music in the background, and maybe checking Wikipedia. Watching a bit of video could wipe off an hour of battery life in a quarter of the time. I haven’t been able to put the battery through its paces yet, but all estimates suggest I could be writing for 12 hours straight before having to charge and possibly even longer. This is the third Digital Typewriter feature. I am no longer trying to nurse the battery to last the length of my intended writing session. If I charged it in the last day or two I know I will have plenty of juice.
What makes this battery life particularly impressive is the display that the battery powers. The display is a stunning 2160x1600, which is the slightly taller 16:10 variant of the common 1440p resolution. My 25-inch desktop monitor is 1440p and seeing that number of pixels shrunk down to a mere 13 inches is incredible. Everything is smooth and clear. Text is sharp and pixels are nearly imperceptible. With a pixels per inch of 227 it is nearly the resolution of printed text – which is commonly 300 dots per inch for regular usage. For a digital typewriter this means that staring at text on the screen is not so different from staring at text on the printed page.
And it gets bright. The maximum brightness is 400 nits. What a useless measure that is for the average person. We could convert it to 400 candelas per square metre, but that’s even worse. What it means is that the screen can get to around the same brightness as a good lightbulb, easily becoming the brightest light in your office and still manageable outside unless you’re in direct sunshine. To be honest not too different from a real typewriter, as sunlight reflecting off white paper is dazzling. By default the laptop will detect the optimum brightness. That brilliant, QHD screen is the fourth joy of this little laptop.
Features I miss about my windows machine are largely related to a few extra keyboard functions I got used to which are not here on Mac. Page up, page down, home, end, I used these often when navigating large documents. Similar functionality is available with different shortcuts but they will take time to learn.
Old problems of compatibility are disappearing. The fact that APFS and NTFS formatted drives won’t talk to each other doesn’t matter when everything is stored in the cloud. More and more programs are cross platform or support common file types. The unique quirks of MacOS are barely a footnote in my operation. Even the window management that Windows is so good at can be replicated with a small program from the Appstore (albeit with different shortcuts).
When I first wanted a MacBook back in 2007, and probably every time I have been tempted since, 2012 and 2016, I think I would have struggled to make the switch. It would have meant uprooting myself from the Windows ecosystem and everything I knew and liked about it. But now in 2022 the MacBook Air is just an appliance in my wider computing life. I have a Windows Desktop, a windows laptop, a google phone, an apple iPad and MacBook Air and they all talk to each other as if there is no difference at all.
And in that environment the MacBook air is my digital typewriter – coming with me on my writing journey.
