So, the Christmas holidays are approaching, and I’ll be traveling up the coast to visit the in-laws.
Since late 2017 through to December last year, my daily driver and mobile solution for work (mostly Rhino) and communications has been a Lenovo P50 mobile workstation – Quad-Core i7, 32GB of RAM, 2GB Nvidia GPU, 2TB of storage, etc.
Last year, this laptop was relegated to mobile-only use, as both of us in the office transitioned to Lenovo P520 tower workstations – Hex-Core Xeons, 64GB of RAM, 4GB Nvidia GPUs, RAID storage, etc. With three monitors, these have been excellent and productive.
The Lenovo P50 Laptop is a Windows 10-only machine and has recently developed a keyboard issue. It’s definitely reached the end of its useful life as a work machine. With travel coming up, it’s becoming urgent to replace it.
However, there’s another pressing replacement issue in the office. A lot of my Rhino/GH development is now cross-platform, so I’ve had an older Intel-based Mac Mini in the office for testing over the past couple of years. With Rhino 9 WIP now being Apple Silicon-only, a new macOS test system with an M1 chip is now on the list.
Lastly, with a proper workstation-class machine now on my desk, the need for a full-size, full-power mobile solution like the P50 has dropped.
So, with all of this taken into account, I pulled the pin and ordered this on Friday from a local refurbisher:
2020 MacBook Pro 13" with M1 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD.
The last time I ran macOS on a daily basis was for about 10 months in 2016, when I used a 15" MacBook Pro as my work machine. That setup had Rhino running in Parallels; this time it will be interesting to do actual work - rather than just testing - on Rhino for Mac.
Cheers
DK
