Now that Apple fixed the keyboard, I finally upgraded my Mac.
I am a non-combatant in the OS wars. I have my Mac laptop and a Windows desktop. I have an iPhone and build for Android at work. I run Linux servers professionally. I love everybody.
My little 2015 MacBook Air is a delightful machine. But it wasn’t keeping up with my developer workloads, in particular Android app builds. I bought the $2799 base model MacBook Pro 16″.
I started from scratch with a fresh install. Generally I try to avoid customizing my environments too much, on the principle of simplicity, so I didn’t bother migrating most of my old configs (one exception: .ssh/config).
Instead I’ve left the default apps and added by own one by one. I migrated my data manually – not as daunting as it sounds, given that the old laptop was only 128GB and much of it was consumed by the OS. I closed with an initial Time Machine backup to my (aging) external hard drive.
Now I’ve had a couple of weeks to actually use the MacBook Pro. Scattered observations:
- WOW this screen.
- WOW these speakers.
- WOW the time I’m going to save building apps (more on that later).
- I’m learning zsh now that it’s the Mac’s default shell.
- Switching from MagSafe to USB-C for charging was ultimately worth the tradeoff.
- I was worried about the footprint of this laptop (my old laptop is only 11-inch!), but I quite like it. Once I return to working at my office, I think it will be even better.
- I am running Catalina. It’s fine. I haven’t seen some of the bad bugs people have discussed – at least not yet.
- I’m holding on to my old Mac as a more passive machine or as a fallback if something happens to this one.
Only one of those really matters, though.
Much better for building software
The thing that makes this laptop more than a $2799 toy is the boon to my development work. I wanted to benchmark it, not in a strictly scientific way (there are websites that will do that) but in a comparative way in the actually existing use case for me: building Android apps.
The first thing I noticed: a big cut in the time taken to actually launch Studio. It’s an immediate lifestyle improvement.
I invalidated caches and restarted Studio on both machines. The two apps opened at the same time (not optimal performance-wise, but not uncommon when I’m working on these apps intensively).
I then ran and recorded times for three events, on each machine, for both of the apps I regularly build:
- Initial Gradle sync and build
- Build but don’t install (common for testing)
- Build and install
Shock of all shocks, the 2019 pro computer is much better than the 2015 budget-by-Apple’s-standards computer (graphs generated with a Jupyter notebook on the new laptop, smaller bars are better; code here):
Yeah. I needed a new computer. 🙂
I expect 2020 to be a big year for me for a number of reasons I’ll share over time, and my old laptop just couldn’t keep up. This one will, and I’m happy with it.