A funny thing happened. I saved up all last year to be ready to buy the rumored 16 inch MacBook. I put in my order, timing it for when I would be making my yearly stop back home. Apple shipped it early while I was still out of the USA. The local Apple store shipped it back the day before I got home. Then the Apple stores were closed for Covid19. I had to use half the money I saved for the laptop to finance my being stuck in the states.
About a year ago I dropped my 12 inch Macbook in the Bogota airport. It was slowly getting more and more glitchy. I shifted most of my workflow over to an iPad Pro, only using the laptop for things that couldn’t be done on the iPad. One morning after doing a full backup to hard drive, the old laptop died. (Good Timing) I went onto the Apple online store to see what the best laptop I could get for the money I had left, when I found that just an hour before they had put out the new 13 inch MacBook Pro. The four-port model with some reduced specs fit my budget.
It arrived yesterday. Two weeks without any laptop at all assured me that as of now, I cannot move my complete workflow over to an iPad. Of all the Apple laptops I have owned, the MacBook Pro 13-inch, Mid 2010, was hands down my favorite. The only reason I got rid of it was the screen resolution. This new 13 version is now my favorite.
It just gets out of the way. I work, and forget what I am using. I am finding that the touch bar is not bothersome, and it is actually often useful. The fingerprint ID is really nice. I would love it if Apple would give us a phone with the top of the line camera and fingerprint ID.
Today, I am awaiting the delivery of my new iPad Pro keyboard. I loved the old one, but I do like working in the dark, so I was drawn in by the backlighting. It will make my computer bag a bit heavier. Not by much because I will no longer have to carry the external keyboard I used with the 12 inch MacBook, nor all those bits and pieces I had to have to make up for the lack of ports.
I really like having four data-charging ports. Being able to switch sides for the power is something I never had thought of having, but have already been using.
The situationally aware touch bar is nice. I am a poor speller, in both english and spanish. More so in english for some reason. The spellchecker even works on some websites, which for some reason, mess with the Mac’s internal spell checker. One of those is my language learning site, where I am constantly switching back and forth between languages. The touch bar spellchecker switches between languages very smoothly without my doing anything. That is much better than writing my answers on a webpage that spellchecks spanish and copy-paste.
I set up apple pay on the laptop. I haven’t had the opportunity to use it yet, but I am was surprised at how much I was able to use the fingerprint ID while setting up my various accounts.
Since my old laptop died and there wasn’t an opportunity to set the new one up with a cable, I am getting a fresh start with this one. I decided not to try a restore from the SuperDuper back up since it was made on another computer. I am surprised at how nailed down I had my workflow. I am leaving off only six programs I no longer use.
So far I am enjoying the keyboard. I am still downloading my data from the cloud, letting one service download at a time. Onedrive is chugging along now, next will be iCloud, then I will be able to get Ulysses synced to the work I have been doing on the iPad and get back to writing my current novel. Once I have pounded out 3k words in one day, I will report on how my fingers feel.
The only issue I have had with the MacBook Pro 13, is that since its screen is about the same size as my iPad, I keep tapping on it wondering why things are not working.
