ThinkPad E14:
...with some nice specs...
- 14" 1920x1080 Display
- Intel Quad Core i7-10510U @ 1.8GHz (Passmark processor benchmark score of 7210)
- 32GB RAM
- 1TB Solid State Drive
- Windows 10 Professional
...which means the CPU is slightly faster than my work-issued PC (processor benchmark score of 6900) and, with the Solid State Drive, it should be impressively quick. I am also not likely to be running as much on it as I do on my work machine.
2019 13.3" MacBook Pro:
...with...
- 13.3" 2560 x 1600-pixel Retina Displ
- 8th-gen quad core Core i5-8257U processor @ 1.4GHz (Passmark benchmark of 8208)
- 16GB of RAM (upgraded from 8GB default)
- 512GB Solid State Drive (upgraded from 128GB default)
- Touch ID and Touch Bar
- Two thunderbolt ports
As I work with these, I plan to blog about my experience. Specifically, I'm wondering...
- Will I regret the smaller screen size than my 15.6" work laptop? Early indications are yes, I will! ...but a larger MacBook Pro would have cost well over $2000. Maybe I'll use an external monitor with it.
- Do I like the MacBook Touch Bar? Early indications are "no, not really." In fact, the lack of a "hard" key for Escape is very annoying. Apple fixed that by adding back a "hard" Escape key in their 2020 models.
- Do I need all of this CPU performance? We'll see. The slowest activity I did on previous machines was whenever I would program and build Swift program for iOS.
- Do I need all of this memory and storage? Again, we'll see. I seem to consume all such available resources (I'm a pack-rat) on other machines. However, I'm beginning to see that cloud storage allows me to not worry so much about backups AND I can set most cloud storage systems to keep local copies of my most needed files. iCloud seems very good at this; I haven't tried selectively syncing on others as much, even though I have files in six different clouds:
- iCloud (best so far)
- Google Drive (where I have most of my files)
- ASUS Web Storage
- Dropbox (which I am migrating off)
- iDrive (which I used only as a backup tool)
- One Drive (I have it; don't use it)
I'll have to blog about what I like and don't like about each.
