Applepeels

Should I Buy a New MacBook with Apple Silicon on the Horizon?

I bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro in early July of 2020. It is actually the first Apple laptop that I have purchased in the fourteen years since I bought a white plastic MacBook with one of Apple's first Intel processors. It replaced my broken 15" Aluminum Powerbook G4. This time I am buying what might be the last of a line of laptops with an Intel processor. The last time I was buying what was one of the first systems with Intel processors. This decision to buy has been a couple of years in the works.

For those that need a short answer to should I buy? The 13" MacBook Pro is a very good Mac. I hope it will last me for six or eight years. It is much faster than either my 2012 Mac Mini or my 2010 iMac, both of which have I5s, SSDs, and 16GBs of RAM.

The new system has been a pleasure to use. I have only had the system a month so this will not be my last post about the 13" MacBook Pro. If you need a Mac, and you can find any type of a deal, I would recommend you buying this Mac as opposed to waiting for a laptop with Apple silicon.

Unfortunately, if you do order the MacBook Pro 13" on Amazon, it will only have 8GBs of RAM and 256GBs of SSD storage.  The only way to get 16GBs of RAM on Amazon is to order the 16" MacBook Pro which is very expensive at just under $2,100. For my work, 16GBs of RAM is essential. You can, however, get a custom system from the Apple store with 16GBs of RAM. You can no longer add RAM to most of Apple's systems after ordering.

If you are new to the Mac world, and just want a Mac, it probably makes sense to wait for the first of the new line of Apple silicon-based laptops.

For anyone that wants a longer answer read on as I do not come to this question without some biases.

I worked for Apple for nearly twenty years and Apple has not really been price competitive in the laptop world since I bought my white plastic MacBook.  The MacBook Air has been as good as it got but it was never enough horsepower for me. However, I have worked for a company that uses Macs as its primary machine for the last seven years. I spend more time than I would like writing large proposals with Pages which by times drives me up the wall for different reasons than MS Word makes me nuts.

The two machines that have kept me functioning are more than a little long in the tooth, a 2010 iMac and a 2012 Mac Mini. Both have received transplants of SSDs to keep them functional but the challenges of using machines that old in an environment with hard deadlines outweighed the advantages of not spending any money. Since I am ex-Apple, I managed to use my contacts to get a good deal. Even at that, I spent considerably more money than I would have on a similarly configured Lenovo and the Lenovo would have had a touchscreen and a larger SSD.

A computer that comes into my office comes into a sophisticated environment with multiple operating systems. I like it that way. If I need to use Windows, I just turn my chair. While I am tied to the Mac because of my job, much of my other work can be done on my Windows computer, Linux, or even my Pixelbook. I have a history of wanting to spend $1,100 or less on my laptops. I broke the rule for this MacBook. My HP Envy has 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD, 8th generation I7 with a touch screen, GeForce graphics and it came in at less than $1,100. The Pixelbook with an I5, 8GB RAM, and 128GB SSD cost $699. My previous Lenovo Yoga with one of the first 64GB SSDs came in at $999 in the fall of 2012. It is still running.

My new computer is my first experience with macOS Catalina. I have been stuck on macOS Mojave. When I went to work at Apple in 1984, I gave up MS/DOS and did not spend any serious time with Windows until I left Apple in 2004. Even after all those years away from Apple and many of them using Windows almost exclusively, my system of choice is the Mac. I even have a 2004 Dual G5 Mac and a Titanium Mac laptop that both still work.

Having explained all of that, the biggest reason to buy the current Intel-based MacBook Pro 13" is the non-Apple software that I am using on my current systems. I have been through Apple's transition from the Apple IIe's 6502 to the Mac and Motorola's 68000, from Motorola chips to the PowerPC and from the PowerPC to Intel chips. It hasn't always been pretty. You can count on Apple's core software suite, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote to work well on Apple's on silicon. No matter what Apple promises the software from third-party vendors will come when they get around to it. If you depend on a specific piece of software, you might end up waiting for it.

This is not just a silicon thing either. My Mac Mini is still on my desk. I have a nice Epson scanner and an HP Color Laser Printer that I have been unable to get to work with Catalina. Apple does not focus on making things work like they used to back when they were desperate for computer revenue. Even then Apple has had some bumpy transitions and left some users of their own software hanging out to dry. Want to open a ClarisWorks or an AppleWorks document with Pages? Good luck. Fortunately, my Titanium PowerBook will still run OS9 and Appleworks.

Mostly the MacBook Pro 13" works as advertised. The Touch Bar above the number keys is a waste as far as I am concerned. I have yet to find a use for it. The biggest delay that I had in buying the MacBook Pro 13" aside from cost was the keyboard. When I found out that the infamous butterfly keyboard had been replaced by the new Magic keyboard, I went ahead with my purchase. I like the keyboard so much that I have not replaced it with a desktop one.

I also particularly like the way the MacBook works with my attached large Dell monitor. Things wake up the way that I left them which is sometimes not the case in the Windows world. The touch ID seems infallible so far and it is a good addition to the system.

When I brought up my new MacBook, I made the decision to do clean installs of all my software and not drag over everything that had found its way onto my Mac Mini in the last eight years. Besides Apple's suite of software, I use Slack, Excel, and Word in MS Office's suite, Powermail, Pixelmator, Fetch, Adobe's suite of Lightroom, Photoshop, and Acrobat, along with RapidWeaver 8 and Nisus Writer Pro. I have a Canon Pixma TS-9100 inkjet and a Brother HL-2360D laser printer on my network. Both work fine. I haven't given up on my color HP Laser printer but it isn't a priority right now and neither is my Epson scanner. Like everyone, much of my work is done in the cloud with browsers. I have chosen to go with Firefox and Safari on the new Mac. I have encountered no problems. Box, Drop, and Google photos all work like they are supposed to work. I have not installed desktop clients for OneDrive, Box, or Drive.

The only hitch that I have had with the MacBook is network related. Sometimes it seems to drop the connection to my NAS. I just have to reconnect but it is a problem that I have not experienced on the High Sierra iMac or the Mojave Mac Mini. It is not a huge issue and might have something to do with my unfamiliarity with Catalina.

In closing, if you are already in the Mac world and have a significant investment in software and hardware that you plan to continue using, the MacBook Pro 13" with the new magic keyboard is likely a good, but somewhat expensive investment.

If you are thinking about jumping to the Mac world, I would wait for Apple's new silicon. You will likely have everything you need to be functional very quickly after the introduction. With no legacy applications or hardware, compatibility should not be an issue.

My mostly Apple workflow

It seems that it might come as a surprise to some readers that I actually spend more time on a Macintosh than I do on a Windows machine. 

When I am not working with clients, I am usually writing or taking pictures.  Both the writing and the pictures help me get clients.

I use the pictures and my words to describe the extraordinary scenery and relaxed life along North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks. 

While I wander from Cape Lookout to Swansboro, I am mostly concerned with the area from Beaufort to Swansboro which happens to be the area most newcomers like.

I have several tools that help me get my work done.  If you have been reading my blog for a while, you probably know that I use my HP Vista laptop to do my real estate forms and access the few real estate sites that require Internet Explorer.

Beyond that I use my Vista laptop for storage of photos which I take every day. The cheap portable storage is one of the reasons that I bought it.  Other than that and SnagIt to make some custom maps with captions for clients, Windows is not my OS of choice.  There are some things that SnagIt does very well and sometimes I wish I had a Mac version.  I cannot say that of Vista.

As a Realtor® I do not take many interior home pictures.  That is typically done by listing agents. I do list properties, but with the whole world already listed, I have found bringing buyers to the area is far more likely to make me successful.

The unique challenge for our area is that it is mostly a secret that has been passed from visitor to visitor by word of mouth.  There are tourism sites that bring lots of people in each year and some of those people decide to stay.

However, there has been little concerted effort to use the web to attract people to the area.  About eighteen months ago, I used Dreamweaver to develop my first Southern Outer Banks site.

Probably six months after that I settled on RapidWeaver as my main web development tool.  My Southern Outer Banks site went through a major renovation and ended up much as it is today.  I might have stayed with Dreamweaver, but it only comes with two licenses, and I use three or four systems.  I also like the the modern templates and reasonable price on RapidWeaver.  I haven't upgraded my Dreamweaver since December 2004 so it may be a totally different beast at this point.

In addition to the main Southern Outer Banks site, there is also a clone of part of the site with somewhat out of sync content and no advertising in order to stay with the rules of City Data forum where I often participate in discussions concerning our area.

There are also a number of feeder sites done with RapidWeaver.   My Carteret County Blog would be one example. 

Processing and choosing the right photos to match my content is key to my efforts.  I use three digital cameras and many days take over 200 photos.  The cameras are a Nikon D50 SLR, a pocket Nikon S9, and Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2.

As soon as I come in from chasing sunsets and capturing the area scenery, I often download the pictures using Picasa and my HP laptop.  Once that is done I take the same SD memory cards and suck the photos into iPhoto 08 on my Dual G5 which has a couple of large internal hard drives.

If I have some photos that I want to place on the web for individual reference, I usually do that in Photoshop.  This a sample of a sunset on Bogue Sound which I took this past Sunday and put on the web with Photoshop. 

The only adjustments which I do are typically sizing and getting the image back to what my eye remembers that I actually saw.  That's always a challenge but I am pretty good at it, and mostly know just enough Photoshop to get in trouble so I try not to waste a lot of time on that part of the process.

These days I have been very successful at getting images shown during the weather broadcast on one of our local television stations.  I have usually identified those by a quick look in Picasa and will often send them directly from iPhoto with just some basic cropping and sizing.

I will also size a few images to use with my numerous blogs, Ocracokewaves at Blogger, Squarespace, and Wordpress.  I also have to feed my main blog, View from the Mountain and a couple that have sprouted off from it, Once a Reston Resident, and Roanoke with some sea salt.  I also have a real estate blog at Active Rain.

With the exception of the TypePad blogs, all of the other blogs have little photographic quirks which sometimes require some special sizing.

Once I have a few photos that I am happy with, I'll usually pick something to write.  As you can tell I rarely add a photo to Applepeels, but I seem to require it before I can write for the others.

I do almost all my writing for the blogs in Firefox using whatever tools the blog software offers.  Of course my main Southern Outer Banks site and Carteret County Blog are written directly in RapidWeaver.

Usually after finishing the writing in RapidWeaver, I export the site changes to a folder and upload using Fetch.  There are a few pages that I watch with Google Analytics so once I have uploaded with Fetch, I open the files from the server with Dreamweaver and insert the correct analytics code in it.  Sometimes I also correct any minor errors with Dreamweaver instead of republishing the whole site.  So far that has worked well.

Sometimes like last night I am working on a slide show.  I use ShutterBug exclusively for doing web slide shows.  Last night I did one of the beach village of Emerald Isle during the winter.  I also took a slide show that I had done in January of a new subdivision, Cannonsgate, and added a link to active MLS listings.

The slide shows like those and the ones I did of Swansboro in December or boating last summer help people figure out if this area is right for them.

Sometime I also write for one of the local magazines or create other articles.  Normally I will use the writing tool in GoogleApps so I can access the files from anywhere.  I am working on a book in my "spare time." I typically slip into Nisus Writer for that.  I have been trying to use NeoOffice more and more since I find it very comfortable.

In addition to using the pictures for the blogs, I also use them for postcards which I use both as something to mail and as a business card.  About once every six months, I have 1,000 postcards printed professionally using five or six different local images.  I place those in local restaurants and hand them out at shows.  I use InDesign CS to create the postcards.  I do print some small batches on my HP Photosmart 6180.

I have a couple of mailing lists that I manage using Filemaker.  I use a Dymo LabelWriter Turbo 400 for most of my client letters.  When I do the small batches of postcards, I hand address and write the message with a fountain pen.

Once in a while I will do a mail merge letter for some potential clients.  Then I am stuck using MS Word.

About once a quarter for a week or two I will spent twenty minutes each morning collecting statistics from all my spots where I have an online presence.  I total up how many people touch my websites.  I use Excel and often post a graph on the web that I share with our sales management.  It produces a hard number which validates that my web traffic continues to grow.

In addition to the blogs that I mentioned, I play with a Mac one done with iWeb.  It suffers the most from inattention because I have to lug around over 50 megs of files from one system to another. Mostly I just work on it from one spot. Unfortunately that just doesn't work for me.

I also use Flickr uploader to get my photos to my Flickr site.  In spite of the ease of sending the photos directly from Picasa to my Picasa Web Albums, I will often use a web tool and send them from my Mac.

While I have toyed with Microsoft's new web authoring tool which I like, I mostly stick with Dreamweaver for maintenance on my homepage and my main photography page. 

I have created a few special pages like this one on the White Oak River and this area photo archive.  I have done all those in RapidWeaver which I find to be a very capable tool.

While I do write some of my posts on my Windows machine, it has more to do with disliking the trackpad, screen, and keyboard on my MacBook than it does with any love of Vista on my HP.  The HP just has a better keyboard, trackpad, and a very readable 15" inch screen.

When I have a choice, I will write from my Mac desktop.  This post has been done on my Mac desktop.  Part of that is because it is in my office where it is quieter.  I have a XP desktop and my Zonbu system both in the same office so I could and do use them once in a while, but mostly I use my Mac desktop.

I also use VueScan to scan some documents and photos from my Mac.  It works very well hooked up by USB to my HP6180.

Once in a while I will do an iMovie, a podcast, or use iDVD.  I haven't used them nearly as much as I though I would, but I wouldn't even attempt the same thing on my Windows or Linux boxes.  I have one flyer that I have done in Pages, and I probably would use Pages again for the same type of thing.

I have given up loading photos onto my Linux machine since I have to use a cable plugged from the camera into the computer to get things to work.  I do like to write on my Zonbu since it is so quiet with no moving parts and the fancy keyboard that I bought for it.

I use Google calendar so it get updated from whatever computer I use. It does sync with Outlook.  I do use iCal to grab tide tables which are pretty important for a guy who loves to fish and always has his boat ready to go.

As far as email, I use Apple's Mail app, Outlook, and Gmail.  I like a few things in Outlook, but I don't ever see myself becoming addicted to it.  It's too flaky for my taste. Email is just email, and I will use whatever I need in order to access it.  I have a couple of my IMAP accounts with Webmail.us which has become Mailtrust.  They have a very good webmail interface and when I worked there I got used to it so dropping into that is not a problem.

So while I might enjoy the technical challenge of having to live in a Windows world, using a Mac is like coming home.  I get the same feeling when I work on my Mac as I do when I spend some time in my kayak.  Appropriately I did my most recent kayak photo album using .Mac.

So the next time you read one of my post about my struggles on Windows, remember I am a Mac user and have been using Apple products for almost 26 years continuously.

I also would recommend a Mac to anyone who does what I do.  Though I have had my share of Mac laptop problems, my Mac desktops have mostly been models of reliability.

Also know that if the real estate market turns around, maybe I will get far enough ahead that I can hire someone to do my real estate forms on their Windows machine.

That way someone else can worry about Vista.  Did I tell you about my forms package crashing three times on Saturday night?  Surely people can build better software than that.