I have my entire work life on a MacBook Pro M1 16. This (relatively) little device is more powerful than any PC I ever built, and I take it back and forth to the office in a backpack or briefcase. When I get to work, I plug it into an external monitor, USB hub, external speakers, and power.
It’s occurred to me that if my MacBook breaks or gets stolen, I’ll be dead in the water. This makes me nervous. All our work is in Dropbox, so I can be up and running on an office PC in a minute. But my Mac has dozens of customized productivity apps and utilities, and I rely on my Mac workflow. I back up my MacBook using Carbon Copy Cloner once a week.
When the new M4 Mac Minis are announced, or maybe when the next Studio is released, I was thinking of getting one that will stay at my office. This would run continual backups, SpamSieve would run 24/7, and I wouldn’t have to bring my MacBook back and forth and plug it in. My apps would use iCloud to store their data in addition to the work files in the Dropbox. I could use something like Jump Desktop to connect to my work Mac and run searches on Foxtrot.
Those who do this, is it worth it? Right now, when I open my MacBook, everything I was working on is right there where I left off. I don’t have to maintain duplicate copies of apps and settings on two machines. I don’t have to wait for my laptop to sync when I open it to do work. Do the benefits of the two Macs outweigh this? Thanks for any thoughts!
If it’s only to resume working faster, I wouldn’t. You already have a good backup, right? A quick trip to Best Buy or an Apple Store and ~45 minutes to restore from your Time Machine disk should have you running again. And as you said, you can do work on an office PC while that’s running.
I agree with @airwhale The only potential downside is that many App’s don’t have a way to sync their settings, so you’ll need to make any changes twice.
But if it’s that important to you it’s worth spending the money.
Is it worth it . . . to purchase a replacement Mac now rather than after you suffer a loss?
All my files are in Google Drive or my home server. When my iPad Pro was damaged recently, I ordered a new iPad Air, picked it up at an Apple Store, and was back in business in a few hours. So . . .
To me the question is would you rather have a new Mac today, or a newer Mac a year or two, or longer, from now?
My wife and I have 3 different Macs in the house. 1 is a Mac Mini set up as a file server. Pretty boring stuff, but it’s a tool for a purpose.
The other is my M1 Max 16" MBP, probably similar to yours. It’s my daily driver, plugged into two Studio Displays basically all the time. Next week, I’m travelling for a work retreat, and I’ll bring it with me. (I bring it with me any time I have an overnight in case of client emergencies.)
The third is a MacBook Air, which is my wife’s primary home machine and my “I’m too lazy to get my big machine for web browsing and email, and I have a login here” computer.
It’s worth mentioning that some things are annoying to sync. Docker instances and databases, typefaces in Font Book, Creative Cloud assets, databases in their own applications (like Eagle for asset syncing), etc. There are a lot of pro tools that are simply more difficult to maintain across multiple devices.
If your life doesn’t require those pro tools, two machines is easy. But at the same time, it becomes so easy as to make your primary concern — having another computer you can pick up in times of crisis — to be fairly moot.
A couple other things:
In times of crisis, like when a laptop dies, rarely do we chuck the machine aside and go straight back to work anyway. There are stresses involved with replacing a production tool that we pretend don’t exist, but that stress will absorb most of your focus anyway.
If you’re considering the Mac Studio/MacBook combo, I think most folks are better served with a tiny laptop for the sake of portability and a beefy Studio for the sake of power. Could you afford both those things? Otherwise you’re lugging around a portable boat with similar specs to your main tank.
I’ve had a two computer (desktop/laptop) lifestyle for more than 20 years. I use the MBP for travel and teaching before I retired. An iMac sits at my desk at home, and before I retired I sneaked a Mac mini into work, which I used along side my work-issued PC workstation. I never had any issues with synchronization (Chronosync and more recently cloud sync, Resilio sync.
Several times over the years I considered just making the MBP my sole system and docking it at home (like you do), but I actually considered it to be too cumbersome to be dealing with the constant connecting/disconnect of two monitors, wired keyboard, and wired mouse. Also concerned about cooling of the MBP in clamshell mode.
Were you ever syncing installed typefaces, VMs, private app databases, or anything like that? Not trying to be snarky. I just don’t know if the tools you’re talking about solve those problems.
To me the 16 inch MBP only makes sense for people who need to bring both a very powerful processor with active cooling and a larger screen to remote sites, and need those both so much that it’s worth putting up with the considerable weight and bulk.
I recognize the problem! But it wasn’t an issue. While I heavily used VMs, the data files associated with the apps I used in the VMs were kept on a “network drive”, namely the MacOS drive, which can be easily synced and backed up. So beyond making archival copies of the VMs data backups were not necessary. Just putting a VM in a backup set is a disaster when doing incremental backups.
The only other problem could have been the Aperture (at the time) vaults. I’d create a vault on a vacation to store and edit photos. Then I had to manually transfer to the Aperture vault on my desktop. When I had to switch to Lightroom, I stopped editing on vacation and just copied the image files between machines.
I purchased a few families of fonts which I use in my books and teaching materials. It was pretty easy to just install them on both machines. At that point they have been unchanging.
A typical VM is associated with a git repo, has a SQL database that’s getting pulled from staging somewhere (might get freshly pulled from production if the client has a problem), etc. It’s not that it’s tremendously painful, but look, I’m babying two versions of this across machines and have no idea how to make it seamlessly sync. No matter what, I’m pushing and pulling from the command line every time to keep it in sync.
The photo library is another problem. The only software I’m aware of with a real solution is Capture One, who lets you break your library up into typical folders, basically. It’s nice. But if you’re a Lightroom user, yeah, it sucks.
Anyway, I can totally respect how this wasn’t a problem for you, but I couldn’t make all this work for me. It was so much easier when I was doing photography to have one machine, and so much easier doing dev work to have one machine. It’s nominally easier with design work because the fonts installed to Font Book or via Creative Cloud don’t auto-install on second machines, so I still need to manage that.
All I’m saying is that another machine is another thing to manage, and if one finds that irksome because they already manage a lot of things, welp…
I’m pretty familiar with that workflow because I did that for more than a decade. You have your git repo, and can refresh your working set on demand. Perhaps you are already automating VM creation with Vagrant or something like that. I honestly fail to see the problem in this scheme --it’s simple, it’s under your control, and it works. Unless syncing databases is too slow… why bother trying to optimise this?
It depends on what you do with your computer… I happen to use a MBP at work and a Mac mini at home and I usually don’t feel any disruption if I need to work from home. iCloud and basically everything else syncs pretty fast. Even Arc Browser presents a snapshot with the tabs and workspaces opened when I left the office, with the added bonus that everything of importance is also available in my iPad and iPhone. Also, you avoid carrying the laptop weight with you during commute.
Still, @cornchip has a solid point, if you are only concerned about avoiding work disruptions, using Time Machine may be more cost effective.
It’s the setup that bothers me more than the day to day use: build the Docker instance, set up the .env files, set up the all the scripts that pull assets and databases with their own .env files, etc. It’s an hour of work for every new project, and like any programmer, I’m lazy. I’d rather just have one machine so I don’t have to do it twice.
Well, yes! I’ve used several version control systems. The goal is to have a repository on a server which you pull from on your different clients. It’s not intended for peer-to-peer. I’ve never used one at home – although I see advantages for reverting to earlier versions and to fork projects, it just too overblown for personal use.
I will have to slightly take that back. At my final job engineering used Subversion (SVN) for source code management. About half the people didn’t know how to use it properly when I got there. I installed a SVN server on my Mac and ran two VMs, one Windows and one Linux (they used Linux for calibration and test computers in manufacturing). I set up a class where I demonstrated how SVN gets successfully used and in the class I demonstrated by checking out and back in on the three systems simultaneously, as would be the case with multiple users.
I use a M1 iMac as my primary computer. In addition I have an old (2015) MBA to use when traveling and I need a Mac instead of my iPad. I’m retired so work doesn’t enter into the equation. Files are synced via iCloud. So far it has worked well for me. For the things I do the 24” screen on the iMac is an ideal size. My travels can often be one to two months at a time.
Impressive! I think we’re on the same page. I was talking about this with Matt Birchler on Mastodon a while back when he was musing about why Vision Pro sales aren’t blowing folks away. And I think some people have just hit their limit on the number of computers they want to manage.
I think more than one computer, given all the systems we’re discussing here, present a number of downsides for me. I’ve done it. I don’t love it. One machine makes it faster and easier for me to get my work done, and if I need a backup, I can grab something from the Apple Store quick and be back up and running within a couple hours in case of calamity.
If you live within a short distance of an Apple Store. OP has a US flag, so there is a reasonable chance this is true, though I’ve heard from people who live multiple hours’ drive away from one. As for anyone in New Zealand or Ireland (two I know off the top of my head) or many other countries, it’s simply not an option.
Also… the “pick it up from a store” assumes you have a stock configuration. In a pinch, this could get you through the worst, but if I lost my 4TB M3 Pro MacBook Pro, I would not be a happy camper with any configuration of Mac with only 1TB of storage!