Like many previous posters, I spent a large part of my early (research) career building and upgrading and programming and interfacing PCs to do laboratory things. I had all the memory management faff (who remembers Qemm?) and spent several years in the much under-appreciated OS/2 world (flat memory, preemptive multitasking, IRQ based semaphoresā¦ yea please). I first used Windows with NT, which was fine. All my office machines were later gen Win boxes, our corporate suite was Word/Excel//Outlook. Fine.
When I paid out of my own pocket for the first time, I bought late 2012 Mac minis; partly because of form factor, partly because the full software suite came with it, partly because the underlying Unix was easily accessible via a command line more akin to OS/2 than WinXP, possibly mainly because I was trying to have a concrete distinction between work computing and home, I didnāt know that the days of hardware upgrades were sunsetting, I just bought the one they offered and kept them until this yearā¦ upgraded to 16GB, added the second drive kit, swapped to ssd and larger HDD using a three hundred and seventeen step process carefully followed from the web.
My wife has had a couple of MacBook Air generations over the past few years, including a new M1 last year. They do everything she wants, really well. I had all the angst of wondering how much purchase-time up-speccing to do, but we upgraded with good trade in once and without any trade in once - not because of under performance but because, well, ālifestyleā and ācoolnessā I suppose.
I waited it out for the M2 Mini to come out, although the 2012s have been past their sell-by date for a couple of years, even for light household computing and heavier media / tv use. I chose the base version of the Pro model because it was a small premium over a larger-RAM and -SSD basic model, had more ports and cores and so on for less incremental cost than the next step RAM upgrade. Itās amazing. I havenāt had a performance boost like this since I did my first original gen iPad upgrade, which was skipping I think five or six generations.
We are nicely Apple ecosystem integrated at home. Tablet, phones, watches, family subscription, etc. It mostly just works, itās mostly just seamless, sometimes you can get it to work if it doesnāt do it automagically right out of the box but sometimes you simply cannot. I expect thatās true for Win/Android too. MS Office works really well, better than the not-quite-compatible Pages, Numbers, and (especially) Keynote (especially for collaboration and even presentation in an Office-dominated world). The family subscription is a sweet deal in that case: multiple users on multiple OSes and devices each for less than double the cost of an individual subscription.
I do lightweight, infrequent, low intensity games only; our son has a PC and could not survive the switch as others have noted.
Iām retired and hoping to actually learn Logic Pro instead of just looking at it. We are considering actually editing out photos rather than just snapping awayā¦ so that will be fun I think. I have bought more keyboards and mice in the last few years than I should ever admit to. We have a couple of NUCs and a recent gen Win ultraportable that I bought just prior to retirement (there are some things - tax software and full featured Overdrive for library in particular - that simply donāt work on Mac). I have one set up as a Linux box to play on (and try out an FPGA/SoC development board that so far mainly tells me Iām not as clever as I was a million years ago when I taught the senior undergraduate course in wirewrapping and hardware interfacing haha).
I do like the improved Win11 experience, but Iām really really liking the first few weeks on whatever the new OSX is (Ventura?) on my shiny and speedy new M2 Pro mini. Iāll likely also get a base-spec M2 mini to replace the other 2012 box in Munich (where my wife works; I bounced back and forth and cannot see myself stuffing the mini in my hand luggage again!).
Rambling, but sharing in the hope that our use case and history is as interesting to some of you as all your tales and experiences have been to me!
