Pre-“Hello Again” Mac Event Thoughts
Posted on
Having been a long time Mac user and developer it’s been very disappointing to see Apple ignore the hardware release cycle of the Mac platform over the last few years. I’m really anxious to see what’s going to come of the “Hello Again” event this week and I might even buy a new Mac depending.
Current Mac-state of Mind
So my main personal machine is a 2011 maxed-out iMac. I bought it after waiting and waiting for a proper Mac Pro update in 2011 that was never to come. Overall I’ve been pretty happy with the iMac. I have had to do a USB storage dance with some backups and media drives but overall it’s been a workhorse, with tons of days of Xcode and Warcraft under its belt.
Other Macs in my arsenal include:
- A 2011 Mac mini which at times has served as a CI box but as of now is dormant (might be resurrected depending how CI plans turn out for my side project).
- A 2012 Macbook Air which I use situationally. Recently for beta testing 10.12 over the summer and the occasional Philly CocoaHeads video capture.
- My work provides me a high end Mid 2014 15-inch Macbook Pro. I’m trying to do a better job of keeping that machine in kind of a white room state just for work stuff with mixed success.
I also have a 27-inch Thunderbolt display and a 27-inch Dell display which I use to extend my Macs in various ways at different times.
To Upgrade or Not?
Technically speaking my 2011 iMac is working fine. It does have some issues: occasionally the wifi likes to disconnect, there are some color issues spreading out from the lower left corner of the display, the DVD drive broke (I bought an external one to supplement the occasional need) and the 256 GB SSD is not large enough to hold all my stuff anymore so I have an awkward HD layout with USB storage. The iMac also runs very hot. I suspect part of this is dust build up but have not investigated too much. While annoying, none of these issues are blockers.
The first big upgrade question is laptop or desktop? I’ve always leaned on the desktop experience for pure power but there are many things that push me towards a laptop as my main personal machine right now:
- I could setup a very “swap” friendly environment that would allow me to have a home work station letting me plug in my personal or work laptop as needed.
- Since I have a Gaming PC now I don’t need the graphic power of the Mac as much making laptop more feasible.
- I am traveling more — more conferences, more work trips, single days at IndyHall (instead of a full time desk and me leaving the iMac there). A personal laptop for these days would help me with that home/work separation on the company laptop.
Other welcome improvements:
- Retina Display. My iMac does not have a retina display and my hope would be that a new laptop from Apple would support this natively as well as support a future retina external monitor connection.
- More SSD storage. Would be nice to consolidate my external drives into one big SSD.
- If I go laptop, no need to upgrade two machines every year with a new OS, keeps all the software/licenses in sync.
- Complier speed improvements. From a numbers perspective my iMac has a good CPU but I would hope improvements to the bus speeds and other architecture improvements would see some improved Xcode complier times.
I feel like in the process of writing this I’ve talked myself into a upgrade but we’ll see what comes out of Apple on Thursday. Enjoy the show.