As a quick reminder, here’s what I stated late last week regarding my hopes for yesterday’s “Unleashed” Apple keynote:
My ideal setup would be a 13-inch MacBook Pro that is capable of running two 27-inch displays. There’s an Intel-based 13-inch MacBook Pro capable of this right now, but I’m hesitant to double-down on an Intel-based Mac given the inevitable Apple M-chip future. I’d like a laptop so I could work from home in the evenings during tax season rather than beaming in via Screens from my home office M1 MacBook Air.
And then:
Assuming Gurman and all the Apple journalistic community is correct, we’re getting 14-inch and 16-inch high-powered MacBook Pros on Monday. There is no way these MacBook Pros debut without 32GB RAM options. I’d also be utterly stunned if they only supported a single external display.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I came away from next Monday’s keynote with pure excitement. I think the odds are high Apple debuts the computer I have hoped for since I converted my iMac to office use.
Hindsight is 20/20, of course — some sophisticated keyboard warrior is bound to say “Well duh Josh, it was so obvious they were going to debut a high-powered MacBook Pro.”
But then the years 2015-2017 happened and it feels as though we’re sort of accustomed to Apple falling short in the Mac delivery department. Here’s Matt Birchler in a tweet thread last night:
I feel like Apple has been absolutely on fire in recent years when it comes to hardware. 2015-17 seems like slow point with aging iPhone designs, a terrible MBP refresh, an awkward Apple Watch launch…
But 2018-2021 has been almost exclusively home runs on the hardware front.
2018 iPad Pro still slaps, the iPhones 11, 12, & 13 all winners, M1 revitalized the Mac as a category instantly, 2021 iPad Mini, AirPods (all of them), Apple Watches, they all absolutely kill.
The 2021 Apple TV is the only exception I can really think of, but it was still solid.
I’m still getting used to this Apple which overtly listens to its customer base. It's almost like they fixed every single mistake they made on the MacBook Pro from 2015 t0 2020.
Now that’s an anecdotal tangent. Here are the specs of the MacBook Pro I ordered yesterday afternoon:
- 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro — Silver
- 10-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
- 32GB RAM
- 512GB SSD
There’s no world where my personal computing workflows and Sweet Setup contribution workflows would call for a MacBook of this magnitude. Instead, I’ve been on this experimental path to convert my entire Windows-based accounting workflow to a Mac. This is hardly the “professional user” Apple has in mind when they discuss the MacBook Pro’s potential, but I’ll kindly ask to be a part of this group.
The Windows-only part of my job seems to be a hardware pig. Tax software eats RAM for breakfast, accounting program files and backups can take up ridiculous amounts of storage space, and bloated Microsoft Excel workbooks can require heavier lifting than some may think. I received a general ledger in the last few weeks that was 35,000 lines long, 400 columns wide, and formatted top to bottom. Searching for “Repairs & Maintenance” resulted in a 45-second process to find a single result. I typed "Repairs and Maintenance" the first time only to be met with an empty search result.
Guess what I never do in that general ledger anymore? Search for specific terms. It’s legitimately faster to ask the client where to look than to go down the path of searching in Microsoft Excel.
Which is to say, I want to be part of the “Needs a powerful MacBook Pro” group. Running two OSes side by side with archaic hardware-hungry software takes some power under-the-hood.
This MacBook Pro appears to deliver in spades. I’m excited to see how the one-MacBook-for-all-the-jobs idea works out in practice.