Head Tale

I’m not 100% sure but I think this is a picture of the box when I bought my last laptop, a MacBook Pro, sometime in 2012?

I’ve had a few maintenance things over the years – I think I replaced the hard drive, added memory going from 4 to 8GB, bought a new power supply and probably recovered from more than one crash – sometimes by simply being able to Google some “Safe Mode” trick that worked to get things running again at  startup but other times, taking it to a repair place.

As I think I said in another post, it was getting to the point that my laptop was being held together with “digital duct tape and hope” so it was finally time to buy a new computer.

I’d read good reviews of the new MacBook Air and considering I probably never used my MacBook Pro to its full capacity (maybe a bit of video editing but nothing too hardcore) and also because much of my computer use these days basically comes down to: web surfing, email, photo storage (rarely even take time to manipulate/edit images beyond maybe some cropping when I first take a photo), music streaming so I didn’t need a super powerful machine.

With that said, I did go a bit heavy on the specs for this one – a 1TB SSD drive because, even though the majority of stuff I do is on the cloud (I had 140GB of music on my old machine and did copy it over but 99% of my music listening is now on streaming services which take maybe 10% of that in terms of local space) I’ve always believed it’s better to have too much storage than not enough and things are always expanding to take more space – photo and video quality, sound quality, etc.  I also went for 16GB which is probably overkill but man, it’s nice – between the new integrated M1 processor and the excess memory, it took like an hour to copy the music on my old computer to an external hard drive but only maybe 10 minutes to put it on my new computer.

Which brings me to a couple lists…

FIVE THINGS I LIKE ABOUT MY NEW MACBOOK AIR
1. Super lightweight (almost to the point that it feels *too* light, like every time I pick it up I feel like I’m going to accidentally throw it into the ceiling!)

2. Nice to have TouchID for logging in to computer, approving app store downloads and even paying directly for stuff online.

3. So far, it’s smoking fast compared to my old computer.

4. For the most part, setup was super straight forward since so much of what I do these days is already in the Cloud (including a subscription to Apple’s iCloud service) which meant a lot of my settings/files/etc. basically appeared ready-to-go as soon as I entered my credentials on the new machine.

5. Instead of buying a Mustang convertible, is going for the gold coloured model instead of the typical Space Grey or Silver the equivalent of a nerd’s mid-life crisis?  Anyhow, wish laptops were like iPhones with more colour options to choose from but Gold feels different enough after a lifetime of beige/black/silver computers.

FIVE THINGS I DON’T LIKE AS MUCH ABOUT MY NEW MACBOOK AIR
1. Probably the biggest adjustment is that the whole computer including the screen is a lot smaller than I used to.  Add in that I’m a decade older than when I last bought a computer and I find that my old eyes struggle to read the screen so I’ve become that guy going into Accessibility settings to raise fonts and other tricks to make it easier to see things. 🙁

2. Debated just doing a full restore from a backup on my old laptop using Time Machine but I was worried that meant I would also import a decade’s worth of digital detritus which I didn’t want hanging around.  So that probably meant a bit more time copying/curating what ended up on the new machine.

3. I guess a part of me doesn’t like the huge premium I pay for Apple products.  But they’re so solidly built compared to Windows machines, basically virus-free, etc. etc. and really, is it a premium if you pay twice as much as a similar Windows machine but the Mac product ends up lasting four times as long?  (Plus I happen to have been fortunate to buy Apple stock around the time Sasha was born and that’s gone up so much, it’s sort of like Apple has bought me this computer for free in a way anyhow!) ;-).

4. Only has two USB-C ports so I had to buy a $100 adapter that slides into both ports and gives me seven or eight different ports – HDMI, a couple USB-A, SD & MicroSD, an USB-C pass-through and Thunderbolt.

5.  It’s a lot better than it used to be as we now have designated “Documents” directories and cloud backups.  But every time I get a new computer, going back to college practically, I always worry that I’m losing/missing stuff in the switchover to the new machine – some web site I crawled that no longer exists or some receipt I scanned using special software that isn’t in the documents folder but tied to the directory for that software or whatever.  But anyhow, I try to be zen about it – if I don’t know I didn’t transfer it over, am I going to realise I don’t have it?