I’ve recently upgraded my laptop.
Previously, I was running a 2017 13” (Intel) Apple MacBook Pro. It was good in most situations. However, the battery has started to suffer. I would get about an hour of (side-project) development time before the battery was at about 10%.
I’ve upgraded to a 2021 14” (Apple Silicon) Apple MacBook Pro (M1 Pro). This machine is wonderful. It’s a night and day difference from my old Intel machine.
The battery life alone has been worth the upgrade. Instead of an hour of development time at night, I will be on it for a few hours and have 90% of the battery left.
I made some upgrades to the base model. I went with a 1TB SSD and 32GBs of memory. I think these upgrades will help future-proof the machine.
This new MacBook Pro has a notch at the top, but I stopped noticing it after about two days of usage.
I am so happy to have MagSafe back. MagSafe has saved my butt once or twice in the past.
I am just as happy to have the Touch Bar gone. I didn’t actively hate it, I just tried to pretend it didn’t exist. It always felt incredibly clunky to me.
I ordered this machine in mid-May. It arrived in late July. It took so long to be built and delivered that I started wondering if I should cancel the MacBook Pro order and buy a MacBook Air M2. The Midnight MacBook Air M2 is beautiful. However, after reading some reviews, I decided to stick with the MacBook Pro M1 (Pro).
The new laptop will be used primarily for development. I do most of my casual computing on an iPad. But I save the real development work for my laptop. I wish that I could use my iPad for development, but I understand why I can’t.
When I got my previous laptop, I said I wasn’t sure if I would wait seven years for the next upgrade. I didn’t. Instead of seven years, I only waited about five years.
I am really happy that I upgraded to a new laptop.