the best writing laptop

It is time for a painful admission.

In April of 2026 I got an M5 Macbook Air with the 15 inch screen, and it is objectively the best writing laptop I’ve ever used.

The laptop has been with me to no fewer than six different US states now (I had to travel a lot in the last two months), and I don’t have a single complaint about it. The performance is good. The display is excellent. The keyboard is excellent. The touchpad is vastly superior to anything I’ve used on a PC. It runs silent without fan noise, and even under load it doesn’t get uncomfortably hot. The software runs zippily. Photoshop, even Photoshop!!!, runs as fast as if I was using MS Paint on Windows 11. And, of course, MacOS isn’t encrusted with ad cruft and endless nagging prompts to get Microsoft 365 and OneDrive and Xbox Game Pass the way that Windows 11 is.

This is a painful admission because I was a PC guy, even a professional PC guy, for a long time. In the 2000s and most of the 2010s there was absolutely no way I would have ever used a Mac for my writing computer.

I used Macs a lot, of course, because I did tech support for them. The Macs of the 2000s were not, in my opinion, very good. They were slow and expensive and had odd design choices. Remember those white plastic MacBooks that were really popular with college students in the mid to late 2000s? Those things looked pretty out of the box, but by the end that white plastic got nasty, and the machines frequently overheated and had hard drive or battery failures. Or the iMacs of that era? Man, I hated those, because when the hard drives died it was always a hassle.

And getting a Mac to talk to Active Directory properly was a pain, and the keychain software broke all the time. Trying to get a 2000s era Mac to talk to a Windows Server file share could cause you to take up heavy drinking.

But of course technology marched on. Solid-state drives replaced mechanical hard drives, which made both Macs and PCs a lot more reliable. As I transitioned away from tech support to writing full time, I started including a Mac in my workflow in 2018 because Vellum was the best ebook/paperback formatting program I could find.

The big change came in 2020 when Apple started ditching Intel for its own custom-made chips based on iPhone designs. I was very dubious, but I got a MacBook Air with the M1 chip in 2021 for Vellum, and I was amazed at how good it was. It turns out that if you design the chip, you can also write the OS to use it efficiently, which pays off. Intel and AMD chips have more raw power, but MacOS and iPadOS make way more efficient use of their chips’ power, and are a lot better at RAM management. While “8 GB of RAM is not the same in MacOS as it is in Windows” might be a bit glib, it is nonetheless true.

At the same time Macs have taken such a quantum leap forward in the 2020s, Microsoft and Windows 11 have decayed quite a bit. It is hard to say that Windows computers are better in 2026 than they were in 2020, and quite a bit of evidence that they are worse. Microsoft really peaked in the late 2010s with Windows 10, and it’s been downhill since. Foundationally, Windows 11 is a more secure operating system than Windows 10, but it is nonetheless loaded down with a great deal of janky features, to say nothing of the constant nagging upselling to various Microsoft services like 365 and Xbox Game Pass. (And, of course, jamming Copilot into everything.) Apple has some of that upselling, but it’s not nearly as egregious as Windows. Additionally, Microsoft’s obsessive focus on AI over the last several years has damaged every other aspect of the company.

I don’t particularly like Apple’s “walled garden” approach to its various app stores, but with the proliferation of cybercrime, I’ve come to accept that it’s probably necessary.

Of course, Macs aren’t perfect. I still think they cost too much, and like every other computer they’re vulnerable to component failure and manufacturing defects. Stuff can go wrong with the software – God help you if updates try to install when there’s not enough disk space left. There’s also some upselling to Apple Music and Apple TV and whatnot, though it isn’t nearly as egregious as in Windows 11. They’re also not great for gaming, which admittedly is not a concern of mine these days since I don’t have much time for gaming.

All that said, I think Macs have pulled ahead of Windows 11.

(Before anyone comments, I’m aware I could set up a Linux system for writing, but I don’t want to lose the significant chunk of writing time it would take to set it up.)

Longtime readers will know I switched my main writing desktop to a Mac Mini at the start of 2025 and have had zero problems with it. I suspect I’m going to have an increasing amount of travel in my future, so I wanted a laptop that could handle every phase of my publishing process, including cover design. So I decided to give the M5 MacBook Air a try, and I’ve been very happy with it. It will meet my writing, editing, and publishing needs when I am on the road.

I don’t really have a grand point here. Just reflecting on how my 2006 self would be shocked to learn that twenty years later I would do most of my writing on a Mac. Or maybe there is a larger point – it is wise to change an opinion once the facts upon which that opinion are founded change.

-JM