When I started at my new job last year, I was naturally also given a company laptop. It was an HP EliteBook 840 G11. According to the specs, the laptop looked pretty good, but right from the start, it wasn’t.
It began with the audio devices, both USB and Bluetooth, sometimes working and sometimes not. This made Teams meetings a constant surprise. Will my headset work? If so, for how long? The microphone too? You never knew. And it wasn’t the headset’s fault, as I tried several different ones, both USB and Bluetooth. It couldn’t have been Windows alone either, since all the headsets worked perfectly on my personal PC. But HP has released many updates over the last year and a half that have significantly reduced the problem. It seems to have been a driver issue.
But the misery doesn’t end there. The battery life is a joke. I travel a lot, mostly by train. You don’t always have a power outlet within reach. Just browsing the web is fine, at least without media. But heaven forbid you watch a video or have a Teams call. In that case, I was happy if the meeting lasted an hour at most. The laptop could usually handle that. At least, if the sleep mode had worked when I closed the lid, which was also hit-or-miss. If it didn’t, I’d pull a hot laptop out of my backpack after a 20-minute walk to the train with 15% less battery already gone. And did I mention that for all of this, I had to set the screen to practically its dimmest setting just to make it last that long?
And then I saw it: we also have MacBook Pros available as work devices. Normally, you can only switch your device every three years, unless you have a good reason. The points above were apparently sufficient, and I was allowed to swap my device. Just in time for my vacation, the 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro processor and 32GB of RAM was ready for pickup. Since we’re also allowed to use the devices for personal use, I picked it up right away and took it with me on vacation.
Even years after my last time using a MacBook (2009-2013, but with Windows for at least 2 of those years), macOS takes some getting used to. Full-screen mode is different here than on Windows and Linux. There’s no taskbar, although I have discovered Stage Manager. After a week, I’m sure I still haven’t learned all the tricks. But the battery life has been a dream so far. I used the device for over three days on the ferry and then at the campsite, and it still had 35% battery left. At medium brightness, which is brighter than the maximum brightness on the HP. The device is fast and quiet. The fan only kicked in after five minutes of playing Albion Online, and even then it was rather subtle. I didn’t dare play Albion Online on the HP on the train, as it would have drowned out the entire train car.
What I still need to figure out: How well does the MacBook work with the docking stations at work? And what’s the best way to connect it to my peripherals at home? I still have a USB switch; maybe I can put it in front of the USB hub and switch between my PC and the MacBook as needed. Then I would only need to connect one USB-C and one HDMI cable to the MacBook. We’ll see, I’ll deal with that after my vacation. At least now I can use the Orion browser, which unfortunately has only been available for iOS and macOS so far. But there will be a separate article about that.
It will be interesting to see how I get on with the MacBook over the next few weeks. Either way, I’ll definitely write another post about it. Even though I’m not a huge Apple fan—quite the opposite, in fact—I still hope that I get along well with the device. The build quality and battery life have already made a positive impression on me.