I’ve been using Linux for more than 6 years and then moved to a Macbook Pro because of the build quality and Unix compliancy. I had a 2019 13" base model MPB (i5) which was great. I built a PC (Ryzen 9 w/ some AMD GPU) on which I carried on the same Arch (btw) install for more than 2 years. I exchanged all that for a 2021 14" MBP (M1 Pro) and never cared about anything released since. I also had a prebuilt for gaming here and there but the Macbook was always my development machine. For context, I only do Flutter, Go, Kotlin, and sometimes compile Rust and C++. So the performance of this machine is massive. I am writing this on its keyboard which I consider to be one of the best keyboards I used. Not because it’s actually good, but because it’s easy to get used to. I also had an iPhone (8 -> XR -> 12 mini -> 14 Pro Max) for 6 years and loved the integration.

When I stopped paying for iCloud tho (in favor of self-hosting everything) things got a bit worse. iCloud email stopped working, I got constant notifications that storage is full and I should upgrade, and if you ever click on this little button in Account settings when you have an active subscription icloud You know how slow things get because it blocks everything with a loader.

Anyway, since the magic of Apple’s “It just works!” went away (Airdrop and Airplay are still great tbh) I decided to switch to an Android phone. S24 Ultra was the easiest choice because the Pixel 8 Pro still had an optical fingerprint sensor and I like to have a nice and dim display at night, not to get blasted with light by my phone thing to authenticate me.

This led me to want to change the Macbook as well in favor of a Linux/Windows dual boot (I still need to use Lightroom somehow so Windows had to be there) since I wanted i3-like window management (on Mac I use yabai which is not great not terrible) and Linux cusotmization. I chose to get the laptop with the best build quality I could find. I was torn between Dell XPS 13 and Razer Blade 14. I chose the Razer and was so disappointed in its speakers and thermals that I decided to return it after less than 24 hours. In these 24 hours, I made all my configs and could not stand the noise the fans were making.

I decided I’ll keep my MBP M1 Pro for another year or so until another Macbook or a proper Linux laptop with great battery life, thermals, and build quality comes out.