RE: Don't buy a new computer this year.

 

In January I wrote a post saying not to buy a new computer this year. I pretty much broke my own advice immediately. About a month ago I came across a good deal on an M4 Mac Mini and decided to give it a try, because why the hell not. I had not intended to replace my old war machine with this, but after a couple of days it was so good I tried it as my main system and I never really went back. Two weeks later, the MacBook Neo was released and I thought, at $599 how bad can it be. Well, it put my 8-year-old i7 to shame and again, I didn't go back. Even with 8GB of RAM it runs beautifully. Finally, just a week after that, I broke down and replaced my 2018 Samsung Android with an iPhone 17e. Inside of a month I had changed my entire computing workflow.

So what the fuck was going on in my head? Well first off, I did have a windfall of cash, so it's not like I used my rent money for this or anything, I had the extra cash. Second, what I've been doing with my computers has significantly changed over the last 6 months. I find I am doing less and less technical things like coding and project design, moving toward more creative things like writing and building content for my D&D games. Even experiments with local AI have fallen by the wayside as I simply embraced a paid Claude account. Third, as I get older, I find my patience for screwing with computers is wearing thin. I just want these things to work from first boot until I'm tossing them in the bin 10 years later.

After almost a month in the Mac ecosystem, what do I think? Overall, I am frankly surprised it took me this long to make the transition. I really like how these three devices interact with each other and it is basically transparent to me. When I get a call on my phone, I get a notification on the Mini and the Neo, I can even answer the call from those machines, the same is true of text messages. Making Linux do this would have been a 6-month journey and I probably would have never been satisfied with the results, and god only knows if this is even possible on a Windows system.

M4 Mac Mini: This is a solid machine, it is perfect for day to day activities and has handled everything I have thrown at it without missing a beat. Its only real shortcoming was the storage — 256GB is just not enough. However, this was easily fixed with a $100 Thunderbolt dock that provided an NVMe slot. The dock also added a 2nd HDMI connector for a second monitor. Only having one was not a deal breaker, but having a 2nd is really nice. 16GB of RAM is more than enough for 99% of the world and it is more than enough for me. Honestly, this kind of made me feel silly about having 64GB of RAM on my old war machine.

MacBook Neo: I am going to be straight up honest here, this is the best laptop I have ever owned. There is a lot of criticism online about its 8GB of RAM and iPhone CPU, but you know what? Firefox with 12 tabs open, Obsidian, Thunderbird, VS Code and music playing, I felt no slowdown whatsoever. Each application worked flawlessly, switching between them was smooth, even when I was dipping into swap space on the SSD. I can tell you from personal experience, this workload would have brought an 8GB i7 laptop to its knees. While 256GB of storage is not enough for a desktop machine, for a laptop it is fine, this is why we have cloud storage. This is a well designed machine that will serve me well for a good long time.

iPhone 17e: This is the device I have the least to say about. Not because it is bad, it is fine. But because my phone is really the least important computing device I use. I'd say 90% of my use case is using it as an actual phone, text messaging and Facebook Messenger, that is pretty much it. Sure, I do light web browsing, but if I am going to do anything more complicated than a quick Google search, I am going to pull out my laptop. My old Samsung phone was fine and this iPhone is fine.

So do I regret breaking my own advice? Not even a little bit. What I didn't account for in that original post is that sometimes the timing is just right. The hardware was ready, my needs had shifted, and the money was there. If any one of those three things had been different, I'd probably still be wrestling with Linux driver updates and wondering why my Bluetooth headset only works on alternating Tuesdays. The Apple ecosystem is not perfect and it is definitely not cheap, but for where I am right now in life, it is exactly what I needed. Sometimes you just have to eat your words and move on.