Happy 2024! I’m still probably the one that visits my blog the most, mainly because I’m the author for every single post. But anyway, thats the not the point of this post at all. It’s to tell the interweb that I finally have a new MacBook Pro! I got this new MacBook for Christmas which is awesome and of course I got it on sale too.
First, the past. I still have my old MacBook Pro which is a 2017 Intel Core i5 with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. It was one of the ones with a Touch Bar and a butterfly keyboard. I did a lot of modifications software wise to the computer like adding VMWare so I could run virtual machines directly from it rather than having to get a Windows laptop (although I do have two of those since the family likes Windows and I’m the only one that uses a Mac). I had the keyboard replaced not too long ago because there was some dust under the keyboard and I couldn’t make some of the keys work. The real reason that I replaced it was because I couldn’t update it to the latest MacOS. I mean there are ways to do it but I could potentially brick it and I wanted to keep it around to experiment with and keep my new MacBook Pro pristine. I’ll still be careful and do things through VM’s where I can but now I don’t have to be as careful about it.
The future is a 14″ M2 Pro MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 512 SSD. I went ahead and got the smaller SSD because I will not be putting VM’s on this computer most likely. VM’s is what takes up a lot of my SSD space so if I don’t have VM’s I’ll have a lot more space for other things on the computer. I have to say that the display is noticeably better, the speed of the computer overall is so much faster but I do actually miss the Touch Bar but now I have dedicated function keys for everything. What did surprise me was that when I migrated from my old MacBook Pro to my new one, the link for my external drive that contains all of my iOS backups was transitioned too so I didn’t have to do that crazy thing where you have to change the backup location for my iOS devices from the computer to the external drive. The migration itself was pretty easy to do, it just took a while due to all of the apps that transitioned too but I also deleted quite a few of them to save some space. All of my apps pretty much worked as they did before since I did a migration and not a re-install of everything. I’m doing my best to slim things down now that I only have half the storage I did before. The biggest SSD hog is actually Microsoft office. I’m considering if I really need to have this on my computer since I have so many other apps that can do the job like Pages, Numbers, and the other app that does PPT.
I did get a keyboard cover this time around that shows all the short cuts on the keyboard thats possible for the computer but I almost always use my external bluetooth keyboard from Logitech as well as my MX mouse with it but this is also to keep the dust off of it. I’m thinking of getting it an external case too for some added protection. I don’t take the computer off the desk that much but I did drop my other MacBook Pro and that was horrifying so I would like to add some protection to this one. I’ll have to scour Amazon and figure that out though but it should be in the next few days.
Lastly, the why did I choose a MacBook Pro over a MacBook Air when I basically do really basic stuff on my computer? The price was really the factor in all this. I could have gotten a 15″ MacBook Air with an M3 but I heard that the M2 Pro was just as good over all and the MacBook Pro’s have more ports and the 120hz display that I have on practically every other apple device that I use personally so I figured why not so thats why I took the plunge. I was going to get it in silver again but they didn’t have it in stock at Best Buy so I ended up with space gray, it doesn’t look bad but I would have preferred silver. Then again, what does that matter in the grand scheme of things? Almost all my other computers are some sort of space gray or black color so it matches nicely regardless. I’m hoping to have this computer for another 7 or so years like I did for my last MacBook Pro, we shall see if Apple lets me do that since this is technically the 2023 model but its still faster than the M3 regular processor so maybe they’ll keep support longer since it has a better processor in that regard.
Wonger's Ramblings 