Using a 2014 Mac Mini booting to an external ssd, with only 4gb of ram, and an early 2015 13’ MacBook Pro with 8 gb of ram, going to upgrade the storage to 1tb and install a new battery.

Both given to me via my neighborhoods Buy Nothing Group on Facebook.

Not the latest and greatest, but they serve a purpose for me.

M2 Air.

Use cases: planning to crush it with music/audio, video editing & voice-over, software development, and art (tablet, etc).

Peripherals: will be getting said tablet, good microphone, video camera/DSLR live feed link, and some sort of audio controller and/or looper.

Fave Mac apps: I feel like a complete n00b to say that the only app I’ve used long enough and was an actual joy to use, was iMovie. I’ll be grabbing a strong IDE for dev work. But I’ve only just begun.

Gripes: alleged limited support for just one external display. I’ve read there’s ways to add more, but it gives me a twitch after Windows laptops that always seemed to do it by default.

Also I’m unsure whether to use my cheap, Amazon USB hub I already have - for connecting monitor(s?), peripherals and power - because some sources say it could hurt the M2. Not sure if that’s warranted or FUD.

Long story:

I was raised on PCs, from Tandy 1000 to MS-DOS 6.22 to Windows 8, because of school/cost/marketing/parents’ limited knowledge.

Finally in my late 30’s I got to use a 'Pro for work (startup, software job), and even though I had to quickly learn ‘the Mac way’;

It took everything I threw at it.

I had to let go of the Pro after that job, but randomly later I was editing a video on a Windows laptop w/ Movie “Maker”, which took 4 days of slow-downs, glitches, restarts.

I then grabbed my girl’s older 'Air and recut the whole thing (in iMovie) in 1/8th of the time.

So CUT-TO last week; a friend said he wanted to sell his M2 'Air 15.x", 2 months old, because it was bigger than he thought and doesn’t have desk-space in his small condo. He bought it new for $1700, but only asked for $1k for it (!?) (Yes; there’s a receipt).

I couldn’t-not.

I’m not religious about Mac vs PC. They both have their pros & cons. I just haven’t given enough time to the other side. So the clock starts now.

…

[Downloads CallOfDuty_Installer.exe]

Mac Studio M1 Max, 32 GB, 1 TB SSD (but a bunch of external hard drives) + Apple Studio Display.

I use it mainly for video editing and graphics stuff. Well, sometimes for little gaming.