For the last few years I've been dreaming about getting out of the Apple ecosystem due to concerns about repairability and ethics at the company (current app side loading drama included). I have an awesome, beefy desktop I enjoy, but could never land on a good laptop outside of the MacBook Pro. The primary concern with the MacBook is that I wear out the keyboard within 6-12 months consistently and I'm on my.... 6th one in the last several years mainly due to keyboard wear out (I type for a living). MPB keyboards are fused to the top case in some genius anti-consumer repair move, go figure, and don't get me started on the older Butterfly mechanism.

I tried a Lenovo Yoga, some Thinkpads (the AMD t14s with decent battery life), Asus G14, and have a Lenovo Legion for portable gaming duty. Never had good luck with Lenovo/Thinkpad, the Yoga was Intel based, poor battery life and the Thinkpad committed suicide via an unsuccessful automatic BIOS update within 30 minutes out of the box. If only the Yoga was AMD.

It's astounding to me how rare it is for a machine to have 4G/5G connectivity and while tethering is certainly an option, it's clunky, even in Apple's ecosystem. I also want to love the iPad so bad, but the jacked up Stage Manager bastardized implementation of a "desktop environment" baffles me.

I also toyed around with Samsung's ecosystem and Dex mode, I was a Moto Atrix fan back in the day and the lap dock they had was pretty ahead of its time. Here we are sitting in 2024 and the best lapdocks has.... 4-6 hours of battery life, 4 if you charge your phone while using it. Considering the case is pretty much literally empty, the decision to install a tiny battery in all of them baffles me.

Apple can stick an M1 chip in a headset and we can't have a single decent option for a docking mobile device with a real OS for some reason? In the age where cell phones are getting raytracing, runs AAA games like Death Stranding and Resident Evil? Just put MacOS on the iPad already and bring Dex mode to the Samsung Fold, or better yet, let me launch a linux desktop in a container when I dock it to a monitor, keyboard.

But anyway, so here's hoping the SQ3 has decent enough battery life and performance for daily use. I'd love to chuck the iPad and Mac on eBay and use it as my workhorse daily driver, with unlimited data 5G and an easily replaceable keyboard. Tap away at work, snap the keyboard off and binge Netflix in bed at night. We shall see.