For a long while, likely since I got my Surface Pro ages ago, I had the idea of a beautifully converged system. Take a thin and light, maybe like the Surface Pro, and add a dock and an eGPU. This device could go anywhere and do most of your day to day, yet still come home, plug into a dock, and fire up some games or do some heavy rendering. Ultimately, the power of a full desktop rig couldn’t be ignored, and although there were times when I revisited that concept, finding something that would work well enough for me was futile.
I was fine with my Macbook Air and iPad Pro over our holidays in December. When we got back to Toronto in early January, I decided to sell my desktop and ordered a Macbook Pro 14”.
The config I went with was a bit of a middle ground. I was very interested in the Max, but the cost difference would have made it a bit too expensive with me putting extra money into the SSD upgrade and additional RAM. On top of that, I don’t anticipate needing much more than the already powerful 16 GPU cores in the Pro in the future. Even doubling the memory bandwidth didn’t seem like that big of a deal in workflows that I would be doing.
14” was a must have for me. I cannot stand lugging larger notebooks, and I feel I can get just as much done on a 14” screen as I can on a 16”. The smaller size means it should fit a bit better into tight spaces while on the go.
I chose 32GB of RAM for longevity. I know I could likely get by with 16GB of RAM, but I anticipate this will be my primary computer for the next 3 years, minimum. I’ve also seen the light of 64GB of RAM, and looking at my uses I’ve really only exceeded 32GB a handful of times.
Finally we have the 1TB SSD. This seems a bit light, but external SSD storage is relatively fast, and most of my local storage was consumed by RAW files for Lightroom Classic, or for games. I don’t anticipate playing too many games locally, and my whole Lightroom library for now and the immediate future is living on a Samsung T5 2TB drive. I’m only occasionally jumping into Lightroom Classic now anyway, and it’s mostly to pull older stuff. ~400-500mbps reads on RAW files are fine for that, and previews/catalog can still live on internal storage just fine. There’s plans for a NAS in our new house too, so I will likely end up moving the RAWs there too.
But why? Why sell off and abandon a constant in your life for so many years in favor of what only appears to be an expensive downgrade?
I’m not gaming as much.
Flat out, there’s very little desire to play games, and that’s been this way since June or earlier of 2021. And what if I do get the itch? Well, the M1 Pro is definitely capable of some titles, and more are being released for the platform all the time, but my primary focus will be cloud gaming. GeForce Now, Stadia, and XCloud through Xbox Game Pass Ultimate all allow streaming on pretty much any device, which for most of my single player focused gaming is plenty performant. Ultimately, I’m planning on purchasing an Xbox at some point as well, which should round things out. The current generation is extremely performant with fast SSDs and high end desktop class processing power, so at the price point it seems like a no brainer.
I’d like to reduce my tech footprint.
Seems like a buzz phrase! I love gadgets as much as the next nerd but my adventures through One Bag have helped me realize I love the idea of fewer things, but of high quality. This mindset is following me into technology - Why have a laptop and a desktop when I can have just a laptop that hits a similar performance in 95% of my workflows?
More flexibility and less compromise.
In the past on trips I’d often have to compromise with my portable device and wait to do a lot of heavy lifting until I got back to my desktop. Replacing the desktop with a Macbook Pro means I’ve got flexibility. Photography heavy trip with a bit of downtime? Pack the Mac and get ready for massive panoramas and HDR merges. Light trip with a bunch of city hopping? Maybe it’s just the iPad Pro! Weekend? Leave it all and take the phone. Lightroom CC has also made it a lot easier workflow wise here too - Any of my devices can be used for ingestion and the workflow across all of them is similar.
Synergy.
Oh hey, a buzz word. Yeah, I won’t lie, I love the synergy I get between the Macbook, iPad, and iPhone. Messages sync across all devices, answer a call on whatever device you’re on, Airpods are connected to everything, shared clipboard and handoff, and Sidecar to use my iPad as a second monitor. I’m definitely missing that on Windows.
Lowering my power consumption.
The desktop can consume north of 500w at full load. Even just the processor can guzzle 135w at full tilt. The Macbook Pro seems to have a full tilt consumption of roughly 60w. That’s insane, considering it’s anywhere from 75-100% of the performance in the workflows I’ll be utilizing it for.
ARM might be the way?
Still up in the air. I know x86 has a long list of legacy compatibility, but Rosetta 2 has shown me that can be fairly reasonably emulated in a lot of situations on ARM with minimal performance impacts. A lot of large tech companies are pushing toward ARM - Microsoft with the Surface Pro X, Google’s recently launched chip in the Pixel 6 series, and Nvidia’s Tegra are all great examples. Apple’s M series launched in 2020 and the various A series chips they’ve been shoving into phones and tablets have really lit a big spark to push toward ARM, and it’s good to see competition. It can only mean good things for the future of computing.
How does this all tie into “convergence”? Well, convergence has changed! I can have this relatively compact computer WITH all the power of a modern desktop. Games can be streamed from the cloud. Storage is cheap in the cloud and allows me to access my data on any device. Convergence now doesn’t need to be the concept I initially wanted, it changed as technology changed. Why need a dock when the monitor at home has a USB-C connection for power and display? Why an eGPU when the chipset inside the machine provides more than enough power at a low energy footprint? Why do I need extra ports when everything is so reliable and frankly better over wireless now? It’s reducing down into fewer items that are higher quality.
Looking back, this has likely been a transition just waiting to happen. I can remember in high school fawning over the old white iMacs, working through how best to get the spec I wanted. I chose a different path back then, but it’s been a hell of a fun one. I can only assume it’s going to stay fun.