jml's notebook
Got a new laptop
Hello again. Posting here both to break the drought and to check that all of this works from my fancy new laptop. I got myself a MacBook Air with an M2 chip, and I quite like it. It feels like a significant improvement over my old MacBook Pro, which is my most regretted purchase. It's also the first time I've bought an Air instead of a Pro.
There are three factors that tipped me over the line.
The first is the price tag. A top-of-the-line Pro costs almost twice what an Air costs. That is a tonne of money that I would rather spend on other things, not least my own manumission from wage slavery.
The second is that I don't really get to use my personal laptop all that much. My weekday evenings are largely focused on getting the kids fed, bathed, and safely in bed and the house in some sort of reasonable state for the next day of chaos. Between church, family outings, and childminding duties, I also don't get a tonne of time on the weekends.
For a while, this lack of time combined with the sheer difficulty of firing up a laptop these days (so many updates, so little battery life) meant that I just used my work computer for the occasional blog post. Perhaps I just don't even need a laptop of my own!
However, work is introducing MDM, and while I trust our IT manager, I don't want to do any personal stuff on a computer that has corporate spyware on it.
Anyway, all of this means that while I am getting a computer, it doesn't have to be a workhorse or a beast, because I'm just not going to do that much with it.
The third factor is that I think cloud-based development environments are becoming much more practical and attractive. The article The End of Localhost more or less convinced me of this. As long as I can use Emacs running locally, I'm sure I can find a way to have fun doing remote dev.
Anyway, the new Air is lovely. It's very snappy, the keyboard is great, and I love the colour. I wish it had more USB-C ports, but that's about it.