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modrianoyesterday at 9:26 PM1 replyview on HN

Yeah, and I'm a big fan of the the hardware. I bought a refurbished MacBook Air in 2022 (M1 or M2, I don't recall) to try it on and see how I liked it. I mainly used it as a thin client to ssh to my homelab, but it was far and away the best laptop hardware on the market and I loved the battery life. I found that I couldn't use it with two (non-duplicating) external monitors, so I considered the test a success, gave the MacBook Air to my wife, and bought a MacBook Pro (which I'm still using mainly as a thin client and ssh-ing to a Linux machine and working there; plug for Tailscale, it makes everything really nice and easy).

I know it's silly to have a MacBook Pro just for the screen size, its ability to drive two external monitors, and the battery life Apple Silicon achieves. And I feel a bit rude not really learning much about the dev tools the community has made for MacOS. But it is just really nice hardware (I just wish it wasn't such a chore to configure my Macbook to have the same ctrl+c, ctrl+v keyboard shortcuts when using an external keyboard, but the hardware is sufficiently better than anything else on the market that I tolerate it).


Replies

annzabelletoday at 12:11 AM

Macs are even at a good price point compared to similar hardware these days, and don't seem to have the same level of planned obsolescence of windows laptops.

A mac with homebrew and rectangle installed works well enough as a hobby development machine for me that I rarely feel the need to ssh into something else.