I have been spending more time than I like to admit making small (but big to me changes) in some setups I have. I was going to put all of the changes in just this post but relized after writing the first one might have gone into too much detail so I will break it out as I probably need more time to polish how to describe the other setup changes.

The first and easiest one was my beloved MacBook Air M2 16GB RAM and 500GB storage. It’s such a great machine, and when I bought it, I was actually able to use it for my day job instead of the Windows machine they gave me. That worked well for about nine months, but then (like companies do) security got ratcheted up and I couldn’t access our Google Suite of things (e.g., email specifically) so it became less than ideal to keep using it.

That didn’t stop me from using the MacBook Air though, I would use it for everything non-work-related. However, after a while I just started leaving it connected to an extra USB-C docking station I had near my work setup, and honestly, it probably hasn’t left that dock in the last six months.

Meanwhile, my wife, who works for the public school system, has an old Intel-based MacBook Air (not even sure which version) with only 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM, barely enough to do anything. She’s constantly running out of space, and it’s painfully slow. So it felt like a no-brainer to give my MacBook Air M2 a new home.

That said, I still liked the idea of being able to remote into a personal computer, since I’ve been doing other projects from it and enjoy the separation between work and personal machines. I ended up finding a great deal on a Mac Mini M1, 16GB RAM, 1TB storage for just $350, and that was the extra push I needed so I jumped on it.

It arrived the other day, and for the first time ever, I used Time Machine to get the new-to-me machine up and running. I was really impressed after some time (maybe my only gripe is not knowing how long it would take) everything was loaded on there. And as far as I can tell, it feels exactly like my previous computer, just now as a desktop.

This setup is a win overall. I’ve got a machine I can sit in front of like I’m doing now, or just remote into as needed from my work computer or iPad. And as for the laptop, it’s now going to be used by my wife for schoolwork and photo editing. The photo editing is something she couldn’t really do on her work computer (way too slow). So she used to carry around our child’s iMac, which she claims is portable, but let’s be honest it’s really not.