Law Students

The Perfect Law School Laptop

By Erik Schmidt

With the recent introduction of the Modbook, MacBook Air and rumors of a coming refresh to the MacBook lineup bouncing across the ‘Net, I’ve started wondering what the ultimate law school laptop might be like.

It would of course run Mac OS X. It would have to cost less than $2k retail in the United States (and more like $1,800 for students). It would have to have sufficient power to handle daily applications, but not necessarily anything as processor-intensive or disk-intensive as Photoshop.

Truly exceptional WiFi would be a must. A screen size in the 10″ to 12″ range would probably be ideal, given that law schools don’t often provide spacious seating. While the MacBook Air’s light, thin form would be splendid, it wouldn’t be critical (or practical, given the price ceiling). An internal optical drive wouldn’t be a hard and fast requirement, but only if Apple provided an easy, inexpensive external drive specifically for this machine.

Battery life, battery life, battery life. Sure, there are plugs all over the place. But when you really need a plug, they’re usually already being used by someone else, or require juggling of books to use.

The ability to go into tablet mode would be nice, but isn’t a must-have for me, unless Graffiti becomes tremendously accurate. In that case, I’d probably want to at least try using a tablet for note-taking and sketching diagrams.

The more I think about it, the more I seem to be looking for a new version of the ol’ 12″ PowerBook. I’m obviously not alone in calling for the return of the 12″ form factor. A somewhat thinner, somewhat lighter, Intel-Powered true subnotebook seems like the perfect machine for law school. But that’s just one man’s opinion. What would your ideal law school laptop be like?

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Full post as published by Mac Law Students on February 05, 2008 (boomark / email).