The Stuff I Use

Like most people, I eagerly anticipated the arrival of the the M1 Pro MacBook Pro and I couldn’t be happier with the machine. I choose the base 16-inch model, as I found it was more than enough for my needs.

The majority of my work takes place in a browser and the most intensive work I do involves, Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. So far, it has handled both with zero problems. While I would have preferred to get at least 1TB of storage space, Apple’s storage prices continue to border on the ridiculous, so I resolved the problem with a much cheaper portable SSD drive.

Battery life in this machine has been nothing short of incredible and the new keyboard is a vast improvement over Apple’s previous butterfly switch disaster.

The notch is unnoticeable and disappears are a few minutes of use. It is a complete non-issue. Personally, I kind of like it and have no problems with it.

I initially purchased the M1 iMac as my company decided to go remote permanently and I wanted a desktop that I could dedicate to my daily work.

It’s also incredibly impressive what Apple was able to do with and cram into such a compact form factor.

I went with the mid-tier 8-core model in silver with 256GB of storage. I choose the mid-tier level due to the addition of TouchID and additional USB ports. In retrospect, I should have upgraded to 16GB of RAM memory.

While the 8GB model can be plenty zippy, I have found it to get bogged down quite easily when having to handle multiple processes at once. This is particularly annoying when doing Zoom meetings during the workday.

This has led to me restarting the machine more often that I remember doing in awhile and being more judicious about my tab hoarding.

Neither are necessarily bad things, but I would consider them minor annoyances, especially when they occur during the middle of the day.

I would also add that despite the occasional sluggishness, I have yet to hear the fans actually spin up on this machine, and the speakers are absolutely fantastic.

The iMac is also my official “gaming” machine and it handles Google Stadia with no real issues.

Like most people, I eagerly anticipated the arrival of the the M1 Pro MacBook Pro and I couldn’t be happier with the machine. I choose the base 16-inch model, as I found it was more than enough for my needs.

The majority of my work takes place in a browser and the most intensive work I do involves, Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. So far, it has handled both with zero problems. While I would have preferred to get at least 1TB of storage space, Apple’s storage prices continue to border on the ridiculous, so I resolved the problem with a much cheaper portable SSD drive.

Battery life in this machine has been nothing short of incredible and the new keyboard is a vast improvement over Apple’s previous butterfly switch disaster.

The notch is unnoticeable and disappears are a few minutes of use. It is a complete non-issue. Personally, I kind of like it and have no problems with it.

I initially purchased the M1 iMac as my company decided to go remote permanently and I wanted a desktop that I could dedicate to my daily work.

It’s also incredibly impressive what Apple was able to do with and cram into such a compact form factor.

I went with the mid-tier 8-core model in silver with 256GB of storage. I choose the mid-tier level due to the addition of TouchID and additional USB ports. In retrospect, I should have upgraded to 16GB of RAM memory.

While the 8GB model can be plenty zippy, I have found it to get bogged down quite easily when having to handle multiple processes at once. This is particularly annoying when doing Zoom meetings during the workday.

This has led to me restarting the machine more often that I remember doing in awhile and being more judicious about my tab hoarding.

Neither are necessarily bad things, but I would consider them minor annoyances, especially when they occur during the middle of the day.

I would also add that despite the occasional sluggishness, I have yet to hear the fans actually spin up on this machine, and the speakers are absolutely fantastic.

The iMac is also my official “gaming” machine and it handles Google Stadia with no real issues.