I hadn’t bought a new computer in over 12 years. What I had: an old workhorse 6700k Windows PC and a now-dead MacBook Pro that I inherited from my wife in 2010. I have been developing primarily on Windows for my entire life. Then, I tried my wife’s MacBook M1 Air after the kids stole my desktop for some Roblox time, and I knew it was go-time on the upgrade.

I had been fiddling with learning Godot in my spare time as way to get some coding in and to get the kids into learning about development in a fun way. I set up Godot on the desktop, started the tutorial and was messing about with adding new things when the kids requested to use the machine for some gaming time.

Fine. I borrowed the wife’s M1 MacBook Air with 8 gigs of RAM and tried Godot .NET out on there. I assumed it would be a struggle to get it going and it would run terribly with only 8 gigs of RAM.

Wrong.

It worked great! Well, okay, 8 gigs is tight. When I had a bunch of things on the go, the clock was ticking on the machine crashing. But if I stayed within a certain range, everything was wonderful. After years of Windows, it was nice to have something simple and clean and intuitive.

Coincidentally, the M4 MacBook Pros were launching right around that time. Did I get suckered by the hype? Yes. Did the machine deliver?

Did I buy too much? Too little? I don’t know. MacBook Pro M4 Pro with 24gb of RAM and 512gb of hard drive space with the nanotexture display (begone, foul reflections!). I would have liked to go for the 1TB of storage, but the device was already expensive. External SSDs will have to do, Thunderbolt 4 or 5 if I really need the speed.

First impressions are that it is amazing. Fast, quiet, amazing battery life, beautiful build quality.

Right now, I’m using NeoVim in Warp Terminal to write this blog post while listening to Aphex Twin’s Music from the Merch Desk, and I’m having a blast.

Next post will probably be about apps, workflow, stuff like that.