Around the end of December 2021, I spent most of my internship salary on a MacBook Pro 16-in. (2021) with the base specs of M1 Pro 10-Core CPU, 16-Core GPU, 16GB Unified Memory, and 512GB SSD. The purchase was and probably still is the largest single spending I have ever made and I sat on that decision ever since the first M1 was released. I glad I broiled and boiled the purchase over and over because that delay finally coincided with the release of the M1 Pro line-up.

Back in 2019, around 3-4 months before COVID hit worldwide pandemic status, I sheepishly decided that I should go on a journey to minimalize my tech life. I tried to achieve this by selling off my main desktop workstation to my good friend in Vancouver and reverted back to only using the MacBook Pro 13-in (Mid 2014). I thought it was all that I needed and it really was. I was able to do everything with the exception of heavy gaming on the machine. Additionally, it had a nice compact size that made bringing it everywhere I went an absolute bliss.

Then, it all went haywire. After a trip visiting my relative downtown, back when I was living near the edge of civilization at the college dorm, it started to behave weirdly. The fan kicked into 100% full swing all the time, the CPU got throttled to sub-1.0GHz speed, the I/O was unresponsive, and any attempt at doing anything was practically in vain. Luckily for me, I had a spare laptop in storage, but I still need to transfer whatever data I had left on the MBP m-2014 and the experience was painful.

Going through this ordeal, I felt utterly betrayed by the tool I had placed my trust on. I thought I could simply get by with just a laptop, like the good old days, and focus on my study. But damn, the laptop could not have broken down at a better time: first research project with lots of code runtime, an engineering project with Arduino that I was the programmer, and of course, COVID happened. My backup laptop worked fine and great and all, but it was a Dell Precision M6000 and it was a tanky boi. The Dell barely fitted into my backpack. So, with the little amount of savings left in my account, I painstakingly ordered a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen. 4 to officially replace the 2 as my daily driver. It ran most of the tasks I threw at it and the slim form factor was good with the biggest trade-off is the thermals which could throttle quite significantly under heavy load, along with the high-pitched screechy fan noise. I clenched my teeth and went on with it.

Some months later into the pandemic, I got my first part-time job into my 2nd semester at the university, doing IT stuff. With some of the first paid wages, I sold both the tanky Dell and the ThinkPad to get a MacBook Pro 13-in. (mid-2019) with the maxed out specs with the exception of storage. With some more wages, I built a new PC + a server, swearing this time, I would never even think of selling them. Then, I got my first internship and with the salary, I upgraded to the now MacBook Pro 16 with M1 Pro chip.

After 3 months of usage, I can say that I am really impressed by the jump in quality, experience, and performance with the new MacBook Pro. The design yells back to the tried and tested form of the pre-2016 era, the keyboard is better, the functionalities are extended compared to the predecessors. And the return of the venerable innovation MagSafe brings me great joy. The HDMI port is an absolute clutch addition. The SDXC card doesn’t really matter to me to be honest, but I now do have the chance to run amok and take photos with my DSLR’s again so it might come in clutch as well. Then, there’s the final piece of the puzzle, the creme de la creme, nice topping on top of everything: the high-impedance audio driver. It almost feels eerie as I had just broken into the lossless high fidelity audiophile community the beginning of last year and one of the most inconvenience is the need to carry around a DAC/amp in order to listen on my Ol’ mate Sennies HD6XX. Well, this new laptop just eliminates the need for it, at least for a mobile scenario or a scenario where I shut off everything else and only have the MacBook open in front of me to do a grindset of pure focus and sprint, like for example, going ham on a development project, a study session, or a research. The freedom of choice that the new MacBook brings allows me to more easily attain what I set out to do, voided of distractions and setbacks.

So, considering the new bells and whistles, I have decided to, once again, go MacBook only, but I am not going to sell any of my PC’s or other high-performing laptops because I think I realize that, aside of them being safety nets if anything were to happen to my MacBook (knock on wood), is those machines are perfect for setting up my lab scenarios and servers which I could use to learn new frameworks and toolings to serve my future endeavours.

To close this off, there are some caveats and the biggest takeaway if someone were to consider buying the new MacBook Pro at this moment. First, the battery does not survive that well when connected to external displays. In my use case, I connect 1x 4K @ 60Hz + 1x 1080P @ 60Hz (+ the built-in ProMotion @ 50-60% brightness) and I use it mostly for web development tasks: writing code (on VSCode), looking up documentations (using Chrome), hot-reloading demo (on Firefox), and the occasional simple REST api (with Postman/Insomnia) automated tests. After around 30-45 minutes of usage, I notice that it drains 5-10% at most from 100% full charge, which is a bit jarring consider the highly efficient components that it operates on. However, I do think that there are still some optimizations to be done on the 3rd party software side to decrease the energy usage. Second, the M2 Pro is going to be released sooner or later this year and considering the product cycle, it would be in one’s best interest to wait for the next iteration to be released and buy that one than going for an M1 Pro at this point in time, to simply get more out of the cumbersome one-time purchase that leaves you seething for the amount of money spent.

That’s it.