My Mac history is … fairly lengthy, starting with the original Macintosh when it launched way back in 1984. I’m not sure I could even reliably count the number of models I’ve owned since then.
For most of the time since, I’ve owned one Mac at a time. There was a previous period when I owned two Macs, and a return to that approach last year has really paid off …
Becoming a two-Mac guy: Round one
I’ve always been a fan of laptops over desktops. That’s partly because I used to do a lot of business travel, but I also appreciate the option of coffee shop usage and the flexibility of being able to move the machine between a home office and living room.
I do, though, want to have the largest possible screen, and don’t want to sacrifice power for portability, so that’s so far put me firmly in the camp of the largest MacBook Pro available. Back in the Intel days, that meant the 17-inch MBP.
That was my only Mac for a few years, until I did a cycling holiday in the Netherlands. I wanted to carry a Mac both for interfacing with my Garmin GPS unit for route planning each day and to write a daily blog of the trip. Since there was not the slightest possibility of fitting my MacBook Pro into my very sleek panniers, I ended up buying an 11-inch MacBook Air as a second machine.
The two-Mac life had both pros and cons. The obvious advantage was being able to choose between a heavy and powerful machine and a small and light one, depending on my needs on the day. The primary disadvantage was the need to replicate my setups on both machines.
That meant installing almost all my third-party apps on each, as well as each of the various utilities I used to make my life easier. Syncing two Macs was also nothing like as straightforward as it is in today’s cloud-based world, so there was definitely an administrative overhead to this approach.
Going back to being a one-Mac guy
Fast-forward to 2016. I could have held out with my then-aging 17-inch MacBook Pro a year or two longer, but the opportunity to update to a much sleeker 15-inch MacBook Pro proved too great a temptation to resist.
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