Starting off I am am far from avoiding upgrading for any reason other than budget. I am one of those people who will go without vs skipping a payment to our staff. They always get paid first. And with the times being tough upgrading past my 2015 Macbook Pro was something I could hold off for just a little longer.
Now I am one of those Apple Guys who can keep a system purring for much longer than they should. This is a combination of patches like Open Cor Knowing when I need to upgrade and what sofware can keep the old versions..
But Software demands are beyond the hardware now.
Even with my MacOS skills there are limits to what I can do. And we have reached that point.
Restoring Phones and Macbooks
One of the reasons why I need to upgrade is that I spend a lot of time recovering iPhones and Macbooks from recovery mode. The problem is that with the older Macbook even running the latest software has limits to what it can do… while the software technically works many of the phones will reset before the restore is finished… This means I have to do this several times to get the desired effect. With my time being the most valuable resorce in the shop I do not want to waste that waiting to see if a restore using USB 2.1 will work.
Video editing
With social media being a power form of advertising I really need to make sure that I utilize my video editing and creative skills.. The old Macbook Pro 2015 just can’t use Final Cut and Apple Motion Like it used to … and while it can still do basic editing … lets just say that if you are planning to process as many videos as I do …Saving 10 min per video ads up … A ALOT
Classes and KEynote
I love Keynote presentations … they are the way to go .. I honrestly do not know why people pound their head ageist the wall of Powerpoint! That said … lets just say that the open core patch and keynote are not friends. Having a keynote presentation crash on you in the middle of a class is a problem for anyone .. but for me as someone who repairs Macs that is even more of a problem as it makes me look incompetent
Do I need the latest Mac? Yes and No
While yes I Would love to have the latest mac I really can’t justify it at the moment. An M1 Mac Mini with 16 Gigs of RAM and 1TB of storage will do fine.. Why Did I choose this VS an M2 or M4
First I had to think about how I am goingto use it … I wanted to have something that we could do video editing. The M2 though it had a better processor the RAM for what I could afford was only 8 GiGs and when you are video editing RAM is very very important … So the performance increase that I would get with the M2 would have been lost in the RAM having to reload all the time.
As for storage .. Storage will not be a problem as we have plenty of external hard drives in the shop.
So why Not a laptop?
While I do need a laptop there is something that I can do with it in the shop … rmotete in .. My Macbook PRo is fine for everything other than the video etc… and because we are in the shop with a gigabit network .. I can just remote in and use the Power of the Mac Mini while using a vintage Macbook .. While the lag would make somethings like video editing a problem.. for those sort of things I plan to be infront of the Mac Mini anyway.