After years, I bought a personal MacBook

The last time I bought a macbook was in 2010. It was a 13″ Macbook Pro at the base specs. It was great, lasted me a couple of years and then I passed it on to a friend. Last month, I decided to order a new macbook, the ones with M1 chips.

I got a mid-range MacBook Pro 14″ with M1 Pro (I just now learned that MacBook is camel-cased). I don’t have any graphics intensive tasks that require a M1 Max so the M1 Pro is going to be an overkill already. My total out the door cost was $2569 (no sales tax in Oregon 😀).

Before buying this, I had a dilemma. I was using my work computer for most of my internet browsing outside of work and that’s not a big deal. It’s all just a browser after all and logging in to my bank or reddit isn’t crazy but I ran into a few specific development related issues I didn’t want to get messy. I have a few personal repos, one being my dotfiles and another for learning new things. The dotfiles contains basic command line stuff that just is that. But the learning stuff could get messy because I am mostly learning technologies related to my daily work but installing dependencies sometimes would hit the work related CDNs to download the packages. And I noticed that the lock files, for ruby and JS were storing the full paths to these CDNs which I wasn’t comfortable putting on the internet. And on top of that, I am not building any crazy side projects but I did want to have a bit of a personal workspace where I don’t have to be alternating between versions for work related projects and personal projects.

For posterity, I wanted to put the stats of the computer I got below:

The few things the screenshot doesn’t have are the 1TB storage and the number of cores: 10 (8 performance and 2 efficiency).