Trying to get away from Apple, maybe next time

This is a personal note about my setup in September 2024, not a description of my current engineering work.

I had used Linux for more than six years before moving to a MacBook Pro for its build quality and Unix environment. My first was a base-model 2019 13-inch MacBook Pro with an i5. I also built a Ryzen 9 PC with an AMD GPU and kept the same Arch installation running on it for more than two years.

Eventually I exchanged that setup for a 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro. I had a separate prebuilt PC for occasional gaming, but the MacBook remained my main work machine. At the time, my workload was mostly Flutter, Go, and Kotlin, with occasional Rust and C++ builds. The M1 Pro had more than enough performance for that.

I also liked its keyboard—not because it was exceptional, but because it was easy to get used to. After six years of iPhones, from the iPhone 8 through the 14 Pro Max, I appreciated the integration between devices.

Where the integration stopped helping

When I stopped paying for iCloud in favor of self-hosting, the experience became less pleasant. Email stopped working, storage warnings kept appearing, and parts of account management felt slow and intrusive.

AirDrop and AirPlay were still useful, but the rest was no longer a compelling reason to stay. I moved to an S24 Ultra. One small but important preference: I wanted to unlock a dim phone at night without the bright light of the Pixel 8 Pro’s optical fingerprint sensor.

Trying a different laptop

That led me to consider a Linux/Windows dual-boot laptop. I wanted i3-style window management and Linux customization, while keeping Windows for Lightroom. On macOS I used yabai, which was useful but not quite what I wanted.

I narrowed the choice to the Dell XPS 13 and Razer Blade 14, then bought the Razer. I returned it in less than 24 hours. Its speakers and thermals disappointed me, and the fan noise mattered more to my everyday experience than the specifications suggested. I had already spent time setting up my configuration, but that was not a reason to keep a machine I did not enjoy using.

The decision

I kept the M1 Pro. For my workload then, more computing power was not the missing feature. Battery life, noise, thermals, and build quality were the constraints that mattered.

I still wanted the flexibility of Linux. I just did not want to trade away the qualities that made the laptop comfortable to use every day.