My Apple silicon journey

In December of 2021 I decided it was time to retire my 2017 13" MacBook Pro. I was having to charge the battery a LOT - at least every day and sometimes twice in one day and I wasn't doing anything too taxing - other than the occasional export of a 1080p H.264 video or playing around with some retro PC in a VM. 

My MacBook Pro only had 8GB of RAM and with the last few machines I'd had to settle on certain things. RAM being one of them. This time I decided that I would find the money and pay the Apple Tax to upgrade the RAM from 8GB to 16GB and I also decided I didn't need a Pro laptop any more and a MacBook Air should suffice so I ordered one. 

It arrived directly from China after a week or so as it was a Build to Order (BTO) option and it would appear that Apple doesn't have stock of them in the UK. Anyway - it arrived and I was super happy with it. At one point I managed to get 5 days on the battery - admittedly via babying it. 


Unfortunately the screen developed a fault on the left hand side so I booked it into my local Apple Store (which is a 40 mile round trip) for someone to look at it. They didn't have any in stock other than one with a 1TB SSD and I didn't want to pay the extra for storage I wouldn't use, so I drove home annoyed and had to contact Apple to get it returned. Props Apple though. They ordered me a new MacBook Air and it was delivered five days later and I didn't have to send my defective one until I'd received the new one. Anyway - it's been working flawlessly for me since I got it. 

We then turn to my iPad. I had 10.5" iPad Pro which was starting to show it's age. I found another deal where I could get an M1 iPad Pro, 128GB with Cellular for £700 so I went for that. I've become so accustomed to the Pro Motion display that I figured the iPad Pro was the only way to go. In terms of it's use, it's just an iPad for me. The battery is about the same and things seem to open up more quickly on it so so far I'm happy with it. 

Finally we have our Plex media server. Originally this was a 2014 2.6GHz Core i5 Mac mini which I swapped for a Dell 3020 SFF which was quad core rather than dual core and this did us well, but when the M2 Mac mini's got announced, I started saving up each month for one. I bought Apple Gift Cards so that way I had spent the money but hadn't really. 

It's totally overkill for a Plex media server but so far I'm very happy with it. I've not wanted to install Rosetta 2 on it, so currently all the apps are either Universal or Apple Silicon native. As you can't upgrade the RAM after the fact, I got the 16GB varient. 

So I have two M1's and one M2. The transition has been fast compared to the PowerPC to Intel move. Everyone seemed to announce universal apps really quickly - including Adobe and Microsoft. I've got Rosetta 2 on my MBA as Minecraft launcher is still Intel only but yeah, easiest transition ever and the performance is just insane.

If you're looking to replace an old machine, Apple Silicon is the way to go.  

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