Switching to macOS again

29 April, 2025

I've switched to Macbook Pro as my main personal computing device again. The last time I used a Mac OS fulltime for personal computing was around 2012, after which I transitioned to a Thinkpad X1 Carbon. I used Arch Linux with i3 initially, then later Sway, and I was quite satisfied with the setup I had developed over the years.

During this period, I've owned two different X1 Carbon generations (4th and 7th), and both were excellent at first. My primary frustration with these devices is how quickly they developed issues. On my first Thinkpad, an entire column of keys including 9, O, L, and . stopped functioning after a couple of years of daily use. I tried replacing the keys thinking that the problem was with the mechanism, but had no success.

Other than that, the trackpad on these laptops was extremely imprecise and finicky, but the trackpoint worked great (after the initial learning curve). Unfortunately, even the trackpoint began to deteriorate in quality after the first year. The little red piece of rubbery plastic started get loose and became less reliable. I think my usage was fairly standard, these laptops are designed for power users after all, but the build quality turned out to be significantly lacking in my experience.

I decided to purchase a newer model, which I used for several years. This time, issues began with the fan, which would randomly stop working. I had it serviced once (a technician came to my office and replaced the fan), but it began failing again just a couple of weeks later. Around the same time, the screen started to flicker and randomly go black, to the point where it became almost impossible to use it as a laptop. At that point, I'd grown frustrated with the entire Thinkpad lineup. I expected premium quality to match their premium price. I continued using this last Thinkpad in docked mode for a while, eventually resorting to Arch on WSL on my Windows PC (which performed surprisingly well). My experience probably doesn't reflect the quality of the entire Thinkpad lineup, but I wasn't going to keep trying, these devices aren't cheap.

My experience with Apple's laptop build quality has been exceptional in the past, and I've been using an M1 Pro for work since 2020 (though most of the time I was connected to a remote linux VM) and it still looks and functions perfectly. So I recently decided to purchase one of the new M4 models for my personal daily driver and settled on the M4 Pro with 24GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. This configuration seemed to offered a good balance between price and future-proofing for me.

I'm not the biggest fan of macOS and sort of wary of the possible redesign, but it still suites me better than Windows, and I can navigate my way around customizing things better.