Chris Wiegman
I’ve been pretty excited about getting a new Mac for quite some time now. I sold my last laptop in June and thought I could get by on an iPad alone but, I was wrong. Without a laptop of my own I seriously missed side projects and coding.
As soon as the new MacBook Pros were announced last month I ordered one. I , a 16″ M1 Max with 64gb of RAM and a 1tb hard drive. It’s a beast of a machine that, I hope, will last me a good number of years.
It arrived on Wednesday and I spent a good part of the last two nights setting it up so I could get to work. Here are my first impressions.
It’s quiet
I haven’t thrown much in the way of tasks at it, yet. That said, both my work Mac and my last personal laptop often sounded like a jet plane was taking off with even the simplest of Docker apps. After a few hours doing the same with this machine I haven’t heard the fan yet.
It’s funny, I can’t say I ever really noticed the fan with previous machines but I do notice the quiet in my office with this machine. I wouldn’t have bought it just for this but it has been nice.
MacOS is still a pain
I miss Linux. Wednesday night I spent a good two hours on Apple’s phone support to help me figure out why my Apple account wouldn’t sync iCloud Drive. The files I had in it simply wouldn’t appear on my Mac. After a while we realized it was my account and not the machine but it was still quite annoying.
As for using it itself, for the most part everything works well except for the monitor settings. I have a 34″ Dell monitor I use as the primary display and I keep it scaled to make it a bit easier to read. Every time the laptop goes to sleep, reboots, etc the machine reverts the resolution on the Dell and resets the laptop monitor to primary. It’s highly annoying and a common enough problem that I wound up installing an app designed just for the problem.
So much for “it just works,” eh?
I missed the device integration
One of my biggest frustrations with my Android/Linux setup was that it didn’t all work together like Apple does. I really did miss that. I even chuckled a bit this afternoon when I mistakenly answered a call warranty call from my computer. The content of the call notwithstanding, the ability to be able to use any device I’m at for anything I need to do with it really is a big deal to me.
Add to that having music, podcasts and more accessible from my laptop and I’ve already found myself listening to a lot more and generally enjoying using the device today.
I get many people are happy using each of their devices for a specific set of tasks. That’s not me. If I’m working on my laptop I don’t want to reach for my phone or my iPad or anything else. I want to access the few things I use from my laptop. That is a big win for me, for now.
It’s a tool
In the end it’s a tool. One I’ll hopefully be happy working with for years to come but a tool all the same.
Historically I got excited about the computers I bought, that’s no longer really the case. I just want something that works for what I need it for and I’m really hoping this will be it.
I know that isn’t the most exciting review of these machines you will read but I feel like “it just does it’s job well (minus my few issues)” is a bar that is so hard to cross in tech these days. That alone is newsworthy in my experience and I’m pretty happy with that.