Chromebook or iPad Air with keyboard case?

If you don’t want to buy a more expensive 11-inch MacBook Air, would you buy a Chromebook[1] or an iPad Air with keyboard case?

The perfect combination for me

Personally I really don’t know the answer to that question. I have my beloved 11-inch MacBook Air for video editing, blogging, writing and much, much more, and my beloved Sony Xperia Z1 for my Android experience. I write a lot on my Android phone for example. I love the keyboard apps like Swype (my favorite) and SwiftKey. They make writing so easy and fast.



Cheaper alternative

But if you would like to to do almost the same things on a cheaper device, then is a Chromebook enough, or do you need to have an iPad Air (with keyboard) for that? I know that you need to choose the iPad if you want to do video editing for example, but if you don’t need to video edit on it, and only use it for the rest, then maybe a Chromebook is enough?


Comfort and weight

What about the weight then, the iPad Air is incredible light, but with a physical keyboard case it becomes quite much heavier. How heavy is a Chromebook compared to the combination iPad Air+Keyboard case? My 11-inch MacBook Air doesn’t feel too heavy for me personally though, and one of the benefits with it and a Chromebook is that it is much easier to use when sitting in a sofa or in the bed typing, and iPad with keyboard is a very sloppy solution for that, it’s hard to have it on your knee or stomach for example. Not with a Chromebook, or my MacBook Air.


The reason why I don’t mention Android tablets with keyboard case, is that there is still not enough good Android tablet apps. Phone apps looks so outstretched. iPad apps is in another league.

What would you choose?

  1. Looks like a laptop, feels like a laptop but… Chromebooks are a new type of computer designed to help you get things done faster and easier. They run Chrome OS, an operating system that has multiple layers of security, cloud storage, and the most popular Google products built-in.  ↩

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