If Journalists Reviewed Macs Like iPads

Fraser Speirs:

Again, Mac OS X lacks some of the more advanced media consumption features of iOS. There is no system-wide support for Picture-in-Picture on OS X, for example. This means that watching a video on the side while working requires you to manually arrange your workspace just so. That is, if you even can. Few websites support resizing the video player inside the page, so you are limited to the fixed dimensions of that video and you get whatever is left over to do your work in. Compare that to the flexibility of size and placement you get with the iOS PiP window, which can even be placed off-screen.

Mac OS X also suffers from a much smaller range of available apps. Instead of the native apps you get on iOS for services like Netflix, Airbnb, Google Docs, YouTube and the like, Mac users have to make do with accessing these services through a web browser. That’s quite a hoop to jump through to get your work done: forcing such a huge proportion of your work through one app.

Clever post by Fraser Speirs, reviewing a MacBook as an iPad replacement. I still think the MacBook is the primary computer recommendation for any random user but its certainly true that reviewers overlook many of the iPad’s raw advantages in their comparisons.

This part-satirical part-serious comparison is great in that highlights the things about iOS devices that tend to go under-appreciated. In the course of making its point, it naturally ignores the common iOS shortcomings, so it’s by no means an unbiased commentary, not that it is really supposed to be.