Computers: Mac and PC

I have a lot of background in IT, so I get a little deep into this area of things.

The Mac

I was using a 2015 15” MacBook Pro with a 2.5GHz quad i7, 16GB RAM and Radeon graphics. The one that Marco Arment called the best MacBook Pro ever made. But then I realized I could get the exact same performance for my workload from a 2018 13” i5 MacBook Pro. I picked up a model with AppleCare and I’m not sure I’ve ever been happier with a laptop. But that’s just because I haven’t had the keyboard flake out on me yet, knock on wood.

It’s head-turningly gorgeous in Space Grey; the keyboard is really cool to type on; the touchpad is heavenly if just a little big, and the Touch Bar is occasionally useful and slowly growing on me when I’m not accidentally hitting it. To me, a laptop isn’t a laptop unless it’s so light and convenient that you bring it along without thinking or remembering it’s in your bag. The 15” didn’t fit that description, and the new 13” does. 

Except

I have to use an eGPU to drive a 4k display without dragging the computer to a crawl. And of course you’re limited to AMD. But this Sonnet Breakaway Box has been notoriously unreliable for me, disconnecting itself from my computer when I leave it alone or put it to sleep. This could be the cause or the effect of my other USB-C devices disconnecting themselves as well. Thunderbolt 3 is great, but still lots of quirks.

Apps

I make music in Logic Pro, make occasional video in Final Cut Pro and Premiere, use Lightroom for photo, Audition for podcast production, Illustrator and Photoshop for graphic design, occasionally InDesign for layout.

The PC’s

There are lots of tasks for which a PC is much more appropriate. Adobe Creative Suite is the biggest of these in my experience. I built a Ryzen 7 1700x system with a GTX 1070 and I set up a Windows Server 2019 machine around an i5 to serve as a NAS plus some other things.