New Personal MacBook Pro

Last weekend I broke down and finally did my income taxes. I used Turbo Tax on my old mid-2009 MacBook Pro. When I installed the software, it warned that unless I upgrade to macOS High Sierra, I won't be able to use it again next year. That Mac is too old to be upgraded beyond Sierra. I've been thinking of getting a new personal laptop and this pushed me to finally do so.

Therefore, on the way home from work last night I stopped in the Apple Store in King of Prussia and bought a 2017-model 15" MBP (MacBookPro14,3). The specs are impressive:

• CPU: 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7 with 4 cores
• RAM: 16 GB
• SSD: 512 GB (I was running low on space on the old machine's 256 GB SSD.)
• Graphics: Onboard Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 MB AND a 4G AMD Radeon Pro 560 GPU.

It has the Touch Bar (yawn) and 4 Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C 3.1 ports and a headphone jack.

I got it in silver to clearly differentiate it from the work-provided Space Grey 15" MBP.

Since I use Google Drive and Dropbox for documents, migrating them over was as simple as installing the clients and letting them sync. To move over my videos, pictures, and music, I went old school and sneaker-netted them using a 64 GB SanDisk USB stick with both USB-A and USB-C connectors.

This machine is very similar to my company-provided work laptop so I knew what I was getting. To partially reiterate from my post last Spring after I got that one:

• Replacing the MagSafe 2 power connector with USB-C sucks.
• On the other hand, with the right cable I should be able to charge the battery from something like a cell phone power bank or my Harbor Freight jump pack/12V power source.
• I am underwhelmed with the Touch Bar. At work I rarely use it because 90% of the time the lid is closed while the machine is connected to an external keyboard, mouse, and dual displays. Since I use the machine at home as a laptop, I expect the Touch Bar will see more use.
• It's fast as hell.
• The screen is great.
• Battery life is good.
• The keyboard is OK.
• For me, macOS 10.13 High Sierra has been very stable. I expect the new machine to be even more so, because it won't have corporate IT management crap like the Eracent agent installed.

Since last night I've installed the following software:

• MS Office 2016.
• TextWrangler (in which I'm writing this.)
• Truecrypt 7.1a, which requires some tweaking to install.
• ZOC 7 for telnet and SSH. I don't use it much at home but at work for managing Linux servers or network devices, it's awesome.
• LibreOffice for some old OpenOffice files I have. Even on this machine, LibreOffice is a bloated, slow POS. Amazing.
• 1Password.
• Mozilla Thunderbird.
• Google Chrome.

I still need to install a few ham radio apps, including Fldigi, CHIRP, and WSJT. Using them with my radios will require a Thunderbolt 3 to USB-A adapter, and maybe an external sound card.

One thing I need to pick up is a 1 TB Thunderbolt 3-compatible hard disk, to use for Time Machine backups. MicroCenter appears to have several suitable models in stock.

My employer has a purchase plan negotiated with Apple which saved me a couple hundred bucks on the laptop and AppleCare. It still came out to about $3,100 after tax. That's a ton of money but it's worth it to me to have a top-quality machine that I fully expect to be able to use for nearly a decade.