February was a wild month for Apple rumors. I’m now in a position where I will need to consider what machine to purchase for my return back to daily office work. Perhaps shared before but last year when I was sent home in March, it was around June that I realized in my backpack downstairs was a $3500 MacBook Pro with the old defected keyboard and a Core i9 CPU and 32 gigabytes of RAM. It was overkill for daily work but necessary for on the go video & photo editing but it was definitely a waste to have that laptop literally sitting in a bag in the basement depreciating so I sold it.
I netted about $2200 from the sale if I remember correctly for an 18 month old laptop and I began to rely daily on my now 2 year old iMac (Core i9, Vega 48, 64GB of RAM) and a 2018 iPad Pro which, over the summer, gained the new trackpad enabled Apple keyboard.
For one full year, I have not used an Apple Laptop and now I have to consider what I will buy come June – September when I finally return to the office and start traveling again.
Don’t get me wrong, the iPad Pro with a keyboard and trackpad is perfectly capable. I spent 2 weeks dirt bike riding in August and I worked full time on my iPad and while I couldn’t or didn’t want to edit photos or videos on int but Microsoft Teams, Office 365, Fantastical, Omni-Apps and Safari carried the load primarily tethering from my iPhone 11. I couldn’t work on an iPad 8 hours straight but it is a perfectly acceptable vacation computer now and that is amazing!
Now we have rumors that the ‘pro’ line of Apple’s laptops will finally see revisions and I’m very excited about the possibilities.
- M1X with twice the amount of CPU cores (up to 32?) and a huge GPU all on chip so insanely fast travel time for cycles as so much of the computer’s work will take place on a single die
- 32GB of RAM
- Removal of the Touch Bar
- Return of MagSafe
- Return of an SD Card slot
- 15-20 hours of battery life
Apple’s gen-1 M1 Macs are not as fast as the Core i9 in either my previous laptop or iMac but undeniably, it will be faster if Apple were to do as the rumor suggests and double the cores and GPU and especially if it has a fan for max sustained loads far in excess of what a MacBook Air can do.
It begs the question, do I no longer need an iMac in my life?
The iMac has always been the trusty home computer and it has been a huge fixture of my COVID-19 world and because the iMac was always faster than any MacBook, it’s basically been a rule that since 2009, I’ve had an iMac for heavy lifting and at least a MacBook Air for mobile computing. Now that the iPad Pro is the best travel laptop in the world and the M1X equipped 16” MacBook Pro will become the most powerful laptop in the world, it doesn’t make sense to get a little more power out of whatever the future iMac is. This is assuming the same M1X chip makes its way into an iMac & MacBook Pro simultaneously leaving them on-paper nearly as fast as the other, then a dual display home setup with a Thunderbolt 4 dock and a mobile docking setup would allow for @ home personal projects like video & photo editing and @ work business applications without needing to worry about keeping everything in sync.
Now, it’s all about timing. When will Apple release the next generation MacBook Pro with everything rumored? I’ve heard 2021 and now “late-2021” and today’s rumor is OLED panels in 2022 which isn’t that important to me.
It may be that Apple’s notebook timing does not coincide with having to return to an office and I’m forced to pickup a now heavily discounted Intel MacBook Pro 13” just to get by for a few months and I would gladly do so, as many bloggers have found that Intel Macs are depreciating insanely fast. I think my iMac, until a new iMac is released, is safe but there’s absolutely no way to time that market for a sale of my iMac without shooting myself in the foot of actually getting my job done just to save a few hundred dollars in depreciation.
Personally, the rumors for the 16” MacBook Pro are exactly what I’m looking for. I don’t require a chassis redesign, I just require speeds that equal or better my current 8 core i9 iMac along with an SD card slot for travel as I’m putting SD cards in my computers at least 5 days a week following photo & video shoots.
My hope is we’ll get a new MacBook Pro at WWDC 2021 then I can order it as soon as I get the word from my employer to come back to the office. Then, I’ll very likely sell my iMac and invest in a new Thunderbolt 4 Dock + docking station and pick up a 2nd 4K monitor from Dell to match my current 30” 4K purchases a month before the pandemic started that’s currently attached to my iMac.
I haven’t been laptop-only since 2008 when it was just an iPhone 3G + 15.4” Core 2Duo MacBook Pro. Once I purchased a 27” iMac, I sold that to purchase a 2nd generation MacBook Air and never looked back.
There are definitely times in the last 9 months where having a laptop would have been nice but since I’m not traveling or hanging out in cafes, the ‘need’ for a workstation on my lap is nearly zero.
Here is my current home setup:
..and my former work setup:
