At the time, I had a computer. It was a laptop purchased for me by my employer, and at work I connected it to an external display and used it at my desk. At the end of the day, I would zip it up, put it in my backpack, and take it home.
For the past 10 years, I have worked at a home office, with a desktop Mac as my primary computer. But over the past year or so, I've been using my MacBook Air a lot more, whether I'm traveling or spending the winter in a heated room rather than my unheated garage.
So, which is better, the single life on Mac or being a drifter on Mac? As someone who's been there, and back, and there again, I can tell you that it's never been easier to live the two-Mac lifestyle, but it's never been easier the best time to ditch the desktop and learn to love a Mac. laptop.
The bad old days
In the days of PowerPC and Intel laptops, living this life was difficult. Just running a Mac laptop in closed-lid mode, connected to an external display, was fraught with challenges. Today, most Macs are laptops, but for many years the laptop was an oddity and the desktop was the “real” Mac. As a result, laptop bugs abounded, especially if you wanted to do something as wacky as plug your laptop into an external display and close the lid.
All Macs now let you use an iPad as a second screen. But there was a time when just running any external display on a MacBook was a troubleshooting adventure.
Willis Lai/IDG
What I'm saying is that there was a lot of unplugging and replugging, opening and closing the lid, etc., in order to cajole the computer into displaying correctly on that screen external. Things got better over time, but they were never perfect.
Even worse are the sleep problems. When the Mac went to sleep while connected to an external display, it sometimes wouldn't come back without help or with a forced restart. On many, a lot Days, I would unplug my laptop, put it in my backpack, take an hour ride on a bus home, and remove the laptop – only to find the inside of my backpack burning because that my MacBook hadn't fallen asleep after all.
Stay in sync
Yet when I started working for myself, in my garage, the plan was to use my beloved MacBook Air and plug it into a big screen. That plan didn't survive the release of the iMac 5K, and so began my multi-year stint as someone who uses a desktop at my desk, but a laptop everywhere else.
I hadn't experienced this in years, and things had really improved for many Mac users in the meantime. The existence of cloud services like iCloud and Dropbox has really made things a lot easier. These days, I keep most of my work files in Dropbox, but I also sync my Desktop and Documents folders via iCloud. The iCloud part is a little wonky sometimes, but it's so nice to be able to put a folder on my desktop in my office, then open my laptop and see that the same file is also on the desktop. (And of course, all these files are also accessible on my iPhone and iPad. Nice!)
When I recently had to erase my Mac Studio's hard drive, I did it without fear of losing data. Not only do I backup daily via Time Machine and create a clone using Carbon Copy Cloner, but all my vital files are in Dropbox or iCloud. It just wasn't a worry.
If the cloud makes life easier for many Mac users, it unfortunately also highlights all the difficulties that remain. While some Mac apps have adopted the cloud as a way to sync settings (BBEdit has let you do this via Dropbox or iCloud for a while now), others only do so in a limited way. For example, I can sync my Keyboard Maestro macros and Hazel automations via the cloud, but only after digging into their settings and enabling some specific cloud sync features.
And these are the applications that recognize the existence of the cloud. Other apps…just don't do it. Once I configured Keyboard Maestro to sync using iCloud, I discovered that all of my podcast-related automations crashed hard in the face of Audio Hijack's inability to sync its sessions or its scripts on all devices. (It's even worse: even though you can import and export Audio Hijack sessions, I could only move scripts by diving into my local application support folder and copying a properties list file to the other computer.) My Stream Deck settings don't sync either, although at least they can be imported and exported. At least the shortcuts are synced via iCloud – more or less. (There are occasional reliability issues, but I've found that it works for the most part.)
Many system-level elements simply do not fit together. I'm using the SwiftBar app to put ambient data into my menu bar, mostly from a bunch of Python scripts. SwiftBar is happy to use a bunch of plugins from Dropbox or iCloud, which is awesome! But keeping the Python version in sync on both systems, on compatible paths, with compatible modules installed, is an ongoing challenge. I recently ran a Hazel sync again through its settings sync features, only to discover that my scripts were failing because the connected Python script was in an unsynced directory and therefore my patches on a computer were not running. 'were never moved towards the other.
A MacBook Pro M4 Max delivers workstation-like performance in a portable, lightweight package.
Foundry
The big thing is that my files are in the cloud, and that's great. The details, however, are frustrating. Whenever I go several days without using any computer, I find that I spend time getting things up to date while waiting for Apple's push notification server to alert me of anything that has already been processed on d other devices.
So I decided maybe it was time to stop this madness.
Things have improved
The release of the M4 Macs this fall really made me think about my options. While I decided that a Mac mini M4 Pro wouldn't be a sufficient upgrade over my Mac M1 Max studio, I began to wonder: what about an M4 MacBook Pro Max?
After all, Apple's latest laptops would be a quantum leap in performance over my once-amazing desktop Mac. (Gone are the days when using a laptop required a significant drop in performance.) And if I commit to the laptop lifestyle, I don't have to worry about syncing all these various directories and application settings, because everywhere I go, I'm going to use the same Mac!
Yet: fear of the bad old days. But being a laptop user in the age of Apple silicon is so much better than in the Intel years. Desktop Macs are great, but they're also outliers. The vast majority of Macs in use are laptops. And in this day and age, Mac hardware and macOS itself are almost entirely focused on the laptop experience.
My personal experience confirms this. I guess over the last year I've spent more time using my MacBook Air running in closed lid mode, connected to a Studio display, than I have using it as a real laptop. And the experience was great. I noticed almost none of the oddities that tormented me. I'm always amazed that when you plug in an external display, it just turns on. There are no strange blinks as everything resets and composes itself as before. It really works.
Peripherals have also come a long way. Thunderbolt and USB-C docks make creating laptop docks much easier. In the bedroom I use as an office in the winter, I have a Studio display with a USB-C dock connected to one of its ports, allowing me to chain together a microphone, keyboard, trackpad and a Stream Deck. Connecting to this setup requires a single Thunderbolt cable, which provides power and streams data. It's fantastic.
I'm leaving
After much worry, I decided that I had to admit that the right decision was for me to become a Mac user again. And that means a laptop is the right decision for me.
Later this month my MacBook Pro M4 Max will arrive and I will begin the migration. Of course, I'll probably have to invest in additional docks and cables in order to convert my Mac Studio desktop to a MacBook Pro-compatible model. But I'll also settle for just one computer that I can use anywhere, including when I'm traveling. (I don't like the extra weight of the MacBook Pro compared to the MacBook Air, but I'm willing to take on the burden, literally. And my daughter will finally be able to replace her Intel Air with something better.)
Ten years as a desktop Mac user have been a lot of fun. I had an iMac, an iMac Pro, and a Mac Studio, and enjoyed them all. But like almost everyone else, I found the pull of the laptop too strong to avoid. Even sitting at a desk and looking at a big screen, the MacBook Pro seems like the right choice.
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