On my recent work stint to Victoria it became apparent that my 13″ Macbook Pro (early 2015) was getting a bit long in the tooth. Surprisingly it still did everything I wanted it to, but it was a bit sluggish on the more data intensive tasks and the battery life was moderate. The nail in the coffin was my own bad habits—I like to open too many programs at once when doing ebook development. Typically I might have Photoshop, Word, Excel, Sigil, BBEdit, IA Writer, Preview, Calendar, Mail, NewsNetWire, iTunes and be popping in and out of InDesign and Visual Studio Code. It was just a bit too much for my poor old Macbook’s 2.9GHz Dual-Core intel i5 with 8 GM of memory and work slowed down noticeably.

And since I had been offered a work machine when I started at Orca I thought it might be time to take advantage of the deal. A few conversations later and I order this new beauty. Now this new machine is way over-powered for what I actually need it to do work-wise but since I got almost 8 years out of my old one I figured to go big and focus on longevity over price. I did have to top up the fund because  the company wasn’t that generous, but we worked out a more-than-fair deal.

 

 

Downsides

Of course every cloud has its tarnished lining … or whatever that saying is… In this case it is USB C ports and peripherals. One of the reasons to go with the Macbook Pro is that it at least comes with 3 thunderbolt (USB C) ports and a HDMI port. The Air’s only come with 2 ports… period. But as it stands I currently have 4 external HDs, cables for my iPhone and ereader, a webcam, an external keyboard, and second monitor and ethernet—that’s 10 in total and I still need spare ports for plugging in extra SSDs etc. <y current setup has a generous 4 USB C ports and 2 USB A ports and I have two USB A hubs and I still don’t have enough sometimes 🙂

And since the new Macbook supports USB 3.2 (with a super speedy 10 GB/S) I might as well take advantage of it and at least get the externals’ file transfer rates up to max speeds. So it means a new hub and a bunch of new dongles… But the choices seem pretty thin. Oh well… who doesn’t like researching tech on the web?

But… but… the Mac Mini?

Those of you who follow along (lol) will know I just bought a new computer (“just bought” being a relative thing) back in Nov. 2020. It was (is) a Mac mini (2018) 3.2 GHz 6-core Intel i7 with 16 Gb of RAM. The issue now is how do I divide the workload? I can’t see working on the slower computer when the new M2 chips are supposed to be so screaming fast. And switching from one machine to another is a bit of a pain (although I highly recommend Barrier as a virtual KVM).

It worked ok with the mini and two monitors being my main machine and using Barrier to control the old laptop, but if I want to use the monitors  with the. laptop (and I do…) then the mini either becomes a remote machine (which sucks for anything other than the most basic of tasks) or I need to invest in a real KVM so I can switch monitors as well.

And I don’t really need it as a media server although I suppose I could retire my old Mini (mid-2011). Decisions… decisions…

But regardless I  happily await the arrival of my new machine and the hours of setting up and settling in to get it just right