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After 31 years of Windowsness, I’m I am officially a Macadoodle! I just got a Macbook Pro 2019 16″. I wanted a machine that I could happily listen to music and watch TV on (a great screen and sound) in addition to being portable. And I was kind of fed up with my long hunt for a new Windows Laptop:

• Lenovo Yoga 7i – I bought it but returned it because it sounds like everyone is talking through a paper towel tube!
• Lenovo Yoga 9i – It is a very safe prediction that the OLED screen will look terrible in a year or three. The demo models at Best Buy were already showing their age
• HP 17-cn2063cl I bought it from Costco sounds quiet and tinny and when I run too many Chrome windows, or open 1 Windows Explorer window on the wrong folder, it lags which it totally unacceptable for a new computer with so much processing power!
• LG Gram 17″though super sleek at like 2.9lbs with a beautiful screen, sounds quiet and tinny.
• The MSI gaming laptop at Costco also sounded like crap, despite weighing a shoulder wrenching 7.5 lbs. I guess they put all their effort into the graphics card and zillion rainbow color changing LED lights on the keyboard and case.
• Macbook Air, at 13″, it’s just too petite for my eyes.
• HP Envy 17″, a fine contender. I had used an HP Envy 15″ for my last job and it did well. The speakers were a little weak but certainly “acceptable”.
• Dell XPS 17″ probably excellent but a spendy $2,500-$4,000.

The notion of getting a machine that “just works”, really excited me. In recent years, Windows has changed so much that it’s not like I can fix any problem without googling for it. And Windows is this cranky hodge-podge of legacy systems and new. When Windows got rid of uncombined taskbar icons last year, I was so pissed. I started using an open source tool that rolled back the interface to something more usable. But you know that at some point it’s going to stop working. I’m starting to appreciate Apple’s attitude of stopping support on old machines and jumping to new technology every so often.

I couldn’t conscience getting a new Macbook for $2500+ so I spent $950 all in on a used one on Backmarket.com. 1TB SSD, 16 Gig of RAM, a beautiful screen and sound, the slick Macbook Pro Touchbar…

Set up was quite pleasant, video sounds and looks fabulous (OMG, Youtube videos are defaulting to play in 4k! (sucking up 20mbps, but hey)), and migration has so far gone very well! I got my second monitor set up easily enough (needed DisplayLink and MonitorControl Lite from the App Store but it took 10 minutes. I’m writing this while listening to the best sounding music I’ve ever had on a computer. Yes, it “just works” and I like it.