When we were acquired by PowerSchool a bit over a year ago, I had to put up a wall between all personal and work data to a much greater degree than before. This included them determining my (relatively new) laptop had to be recycled in favor of a PowerSchool issued one. Gone was a beloved 14" MacBook Pro in favor of a very beefy 16". I did not love the 16", but appreciated that they did not cheap out at all on specs. It is a great machine, but it is a work only machine. It does not have my AppleID, and to a large extent, it does not have my data.

At the time, I already had a personal Mac mini at my desk, but I only had an older iPad Pro as my personal “to go” device. That’s how things were until today. It was mostly fine. On weekends, especially, I missed being able to easily use my Mac away from my desk for personal tasks, but it also felt like it made me less likely to stay on the computer all the time. I have traveled a lot less for work in the last year, so that was also less of an issue. My life was just less on the go.

The band forced the issue a bit. The laptop we were using to record sometimes and run our interface has “issues”. So, given that I don’t have my own laptop and I want to be able to record at our space on the Focusrite interface I bought, and I’ve missed having a personal laptop anyway, and there was a good deal on Amazon on a refurbished M3 MacBook Air where I already had a few hundred dollars in credit cart points saved up, I ended up with a new computer.

MacBook Air’s are just remarkably thin and light. Wow. This is a lot of computer in an absurdly tiny package. I can tell the difference in screen quality with the Pros, but I don’t think it’ll bother me that much. Because this thing is so small. Have I told you how small it is? It’s freaking small.

Setting up a new computer without Migration Assistant is still a process, even with scripts I’ve written and not maintained. But I do like a fresh start, and this is not meant to be my main squeeze. Some things that are terribly annoying:

  • Fastmail’s profile-based log in system it really wants you to do almost always creates problems when I have a new device. It’s just about the only thing that annoys me about Fastmail.
  • Setapp was having issues just today in the period I was installing stuff. All resolved now.
  • The Mac App Store just wouldn’t install the 1Password Safari Extension for like two hours. Of course, none of that nonsense is even needed for Firefox. This experience is still subpar and that’s mostly on Apple.
  • iCloud stuff, especially Messages, just has a terrible time without being left to do its thing in the background for hours.
  • MarsEdit still can’t autodetect my settings for my blog. I have no idea why or what I’m missing.
  • I can’t believe I can’t sync various settings via iCloud. Things like “My Caps Lock is an escape key” feels like I should be able to sync between machines without doing a full Migration Assistant situation. Same with “don’t play fucking interface sounds ever”. The all-or-nothing world we live in annoys me a bit– even though MA has been basically flawless for quite some time, I am often not tying to recreate the same machine.
  • For the love of God, please end the annoyance that is the long xcode-select --install process. All of that stuff should just be on the machine.
  • There’s no solution for this, but having many credit cards in my Apple Wallet continues to be the worst part of any setup process across any Apple device.

I’m sure a thousand things like this will come up over the next month as I make this pristine machine a cozy little shithole that I love.