I’m now the proud owner of another MacBook Pro — the 2021 16.2″ M1 Max MacBook Pro. Specifications include 32 GiB of memory, 1 TiB of SSD, with the M1 Max having the full complement of CPU and GPU cores (10 and 32 respectively) as well as a 16 core neural engine. I could nerd on and on about the M1 Max’s vast technical specifications, but I think I should stop here.

This makes the second Apple Silicon computer I’ve purchased. The first was the 13″ MBP with the basic M1 in December 2021. In both cases each computer was heavily discounted, especially the newest by nearly half its original MSRP. The question is why not get an M2, or possibly an M3 based MBP?

One word: expense. This latest MBP is more than a match for everything I want and need to do, and it’s a computer that I can afford to pay off over time, which is what I have to do. I’ve learned to buy my computers the way I buy camera equipment, which is to wait for it to fall pretty far down the trailing edge before purchasing a heavily discounted copy for myself. I now have a 16″ MBP that is, on average, eight times faster than the Intel i9 2019 MBP that was purchased for me back in early 2020. In spite of all the extra cores in the Intel chip, and the fact it has 64 GiB compared to 32 GiB in this latest machine, I can assure you it runs rings around the 2019 MBP and consumes a fraction of the power doing it. Considering how power and heat are going to play a key part in the unrolling climate disaster, those are critical features to consider.

What was funny to me was powering up the M1 Max MBP for the first time. It still had Monterey (12.5) installed. I had to pull down a 10 GB (!) installation binary to bring the computer up to macOS Sonoma (14.2.1).

I’d forgotten the skeuomorphism still prevalent in macOS. It was sort of like stepping back in time, well, two years to late 2021.

And then I rebooted and realized that perhaps it the skeuomorphism wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. And then I went to work, moved the dock to the left edge, and trimmed out quite a few apps from the doc. That’s when I realized how much I’d modified it from stock, and how many of the Apple applications I’d forgotten about due to lack of use.

The first application I installed after initial setup was the Vivaldi browser. The second thing I did after that was to change the default Vivaldi search engine from Bing to Duck Duck Go. Now that Microsoft is mixing ChatGPT into Bing and Bing’s query results, I find I neither like nor trust what Bing returns. I then installed iTerm2, setting up that environment, and then installing Brew to pick up the few command-line tools I’d rather not have to live without.

So far, so good. I love the mechanical construction of this MacBook Pro; it’s thicker, as thick as my old 2015 Intel MacBook Pro, and far more robust and thicker than either the Intel i9 MacBook Pro or the little 13″ MacBook Pro. I credit that to the fact that Jony Ive isn’t driving design at Apple anymore, and to that, I say good riddance to the entire style-over-practicality design ethos. This machine has re-introduced MagSafe power connector, as well as an HDMI port and a port for SDHC/SDXC cards directly on the chassis. It also has three USB-C connectors for just about anything else I need. The key here is I don’t need a mass of dongles anymore. I still need one adapter from USB-A to USB-C, but that’s it.

This MacBook might be two years old, but at today’s purchase price it is the best budget solution by far. I contrast the 2019 MBP with this 2021 MBP, and note that the 2019 was three times the cost of this one, and roughly 1/8 the performance level of the 2021 MBP.

Unless some wild event occurs in my life, this will be the last computer of its type I’ll ever purchase. I turned 70 in December and I can’t imagine needing anything more as I approach my 80s, assuming life and circumstances allow me to live that long. So far, I’m amazed and pleased as punch with this MacBook Pro and the Apple Silicon M1 Max.