It’s been a little more than 6 months that I got back to using a MacBook as my daily driver. The laptop I use is a MacBook Pro M4 14″, with 24 Go of RAM and 14 cores (10 performance + 4 efficiency; also 20 cores for the inbuilt GPU). The screen is a Retina 3024 x 1964, which I use at its default resolution It’s just a beast among all of the MacBook I have own over my entire life. It’s also the first Mac machine I didn’t bought myself. The only thing I miss is the the lightness of the 12-inch MacBook, but I definitely do not regret the shitty keyboard on that machine.

Still, I don’t use most of what Apple offers nowadays. I don’t use Apple Intelligence (ChatGPT in disguise if I understand correctly), I don’t use iCloud sync for my Documents (just for casual PDFs or images I want to share with my iPhone or other machines via iCloud on the web), and above all I barely use any Mac apps except Apple Mail, Safari, Music, Photos and the Terminal. Other than that, I also use Messages (better to type on my MacBook, now that it has a decent keyboard), Preview (I only miss synctex support), and that’s pretty all! I usually have only one or two apps visible at the same time on my desktop and I rarely use the new window tiling facilities introduced in recent version of macOS.

Previous posts are all about the same story. Mots of what I need is managed by Homebrew and various command-line utilities I built over the years. I could easily replace Mail and Music with Neomutt and Cmus. In fact, I keep my emails synchronized in a xapian database managed via mu, and in macOS own mbox format. Oftentimes I find myself using Neomutt for boring tasks like deleting and archiving a bunch of emails, which I prefer to Apple Mail. I use Time Machine for a daily backup on an external SSD, but I also have hourly backups handled by Kopia, which never failed in the past 4 or 5 years.

I only installed the command-line tools, not XCode. The biggest app I have in my Applications folder is Mathematica. I think I don’t need to add an extra 10 Go slot for an application I won’t use except for Instruments.app, maybe. In sum, my setup hasn’t changed a lot, except I no longer use Emacs and I barely do any serious statistical stuff using R these days.

To sum up, the M4 Pro is a great MacBook (I’m happy I didn’t have to pay the bill myself), as much for its design as for its hardware capabilities. As I said, software coming along the MacBook are pretty okay and integrate well together. This is a big win compared to what comes natively on any Linux-based distro. Above all, I like how macOS feels like a rather unique operating system despite the fact that I barely use the mouse for interacting with the OS. I like things that look simple in macOS and not in other OSes, and I like that it doesn’t crash or update all way long. I’m definitely feeling older, and I think I can’t move back now. Also, my work habits and technical requirements have changed. I mostly work on remote servers these days, and do casual stuff that don’t require much CPU or GPU power. When I’m back at home, this laptop is a mean to process my email, write some code for fun, play Minecraft (I can now enable shaders or play full vanilla at 120 fps!), or listen to music relayed through AirPlay. Well, I’m no longer looking for performance, just stability, that is things that don’t break every three months or so. That’s also why I don’t have so many Neovim plugins (only 5), no Tmux or zsh plugin manager, and so on. I want to use my computer, not spend time tinkering my setup.