My Gears

These are my gears.

On the top is my M2 Macbook Air with which I am writing this blog. Below it is my M1 14-inch macbook Pro.

餃子 - the M2 Macbook - is my personal laptop. My previous Macbook Air was a Core2Duo 2010 model. It was still in good shape, solid build, the keyboard, screen display and wifi are all working good in excellent condition. The overall performance is the only reason to retire it.

Everything just works, but the overall experiences are unacceptable. The browser is sluggish, the editor takes quite a while to fire up etc. It was a hard decision but letting it has a graceful death with dignity is the all I can do.

There was a second hand 2015 Macbook Air. It is a shitty one. The previous owner has replaced the motherboard and the hinge is loose. When the laptop is opened beyond a certain degree, the display falls like a flaccid dickhead. It is still lying in one of my drawers.

So now I have a M2 daily driver - a daily driver in Reddit’s term.

The primary purpose of it is to learn Rust and some kernel hacking. I am running Debian VM’s in Parallel. The overall experiences are fantastic. The only minor complain is that the clock of the VM’s will skew after I close my laptop and it may take a couple of minutes to sync up with the actual time.

Yet now I have set it up for blogging. I am more into writing. May be I will write about my writing setup, but that is for another day. Let us go back to the computers.

包子 is the M1 at the bottom. It is a company issued computer. So theoretically I should not do anything nasty with it. When I was offered my new job, I jokingly asked my supervisor what kinds of computer I can get? Mac, Linux or window - implicitly indicating my preferences.

It is an excellent machine. When I was considering my personal laptop, I have considered thinkpad, dell and some other Linux laptops.

Thinkpads are fucking expensive nowadays with unjustified quality and after sales services. Linux version is not available in Hong Kong, the 12gen machine boils like hell, the battery durability is shit and the sleep/hibernate mode are unreliable. For older models, such as the X1C8, there is a psychological barrier. The X1C8 is a good machine but it is more than two years old. Buying a new one does not feel good. Getting a second hand, the price point does not meet my expectation.

I did consider a Dell as the "new" machine of my previous job is a decent Dell 5320. It is a good machine but the build is not as solid as the M1.

The M1 is just too heavy to carry around in my backpack. This is the main reason that I go for a M2. The overall Mac experiences are unprecedented. Everything just works. That is why I would like to stick to the Mac ecosystem.

I need to install some sorts of VPN clients in order to access the intranet. So what web sites that I access might or might not be a concern. So it is better to separate home/work computers.

The down side of it is that some software are X86 specific, for example the TerminusDB and the linux kernel module cheat.

Yet nothing is perfect, right? Things will be migrated to the aarch64, it is only a matter of time. If there is really a need for X86, Proxmox could be a solution. Let’s see.