Considering the Laptop Life?

My very first Mac was a 17″ Powerbook G4, purchased shortly after graduating from design school in 2004. It was a good machine for the time, but I basically only remember two things about it: How excited I was when I first got it, and how badly it needed to be replace a few years later. Ever since then I’ve been using a desktop, starting with a 2008 cheese grater Mac Pro, and new iMacs every few years after.

I’m now facing a dilemma… the iMac I’ve been using since 2014 finally shit the bed. But I didn’t want to replace it with another iMac, because Apple is currently going through the transition from Intel chips to their own silicon. It doesn’t make any sense to me to purchase a new Intel machine now and be stuck on Intel for the next 5 years.

So I opted to pick up a new Apple silicon MacBook Air. It’s been connected to a single Thunderbolt Display through a series of dongles, and overall it’s worked fairly okay. But its not a pro machine and does suffer some performance gaps during the work day. It can also only natively support a single display, which means my current setup is an old standard-res monitor next to a tiny hi-res laptop screen.

I’ve been making it work but it’s not ideal.

The real question is should I move forward with a laptop as my main work machine… Apple released new MacBook Pro’s today and they are seriously powerful machines. There have been a few good sides to laptop life, mainly that my full work setup is always with me. I don’t work from home too much but if I got another monitor I certainly could!

But should I wait for the big iMac? It wasn’t announced today so it’s probably not coming out until later next year. Desktop computers have done me so well for so long. They last for 5 or more years. This last one was 7 years old! You could argue that’s way too long but it was working great, until it wasn’t.

So we’ll see… I can get work done for now but a decision will have to be made soon. Kari is of course concerned about the cost but a good computer setup is critical. Especially now that we’re swamped with work, efficiency is worth the price.