I got my first new laptop since fall of 2019. I ordered the last MacbookPro on an Intel chip when I arrived at ASU. It was—is—a wonderful machine and still serviceable. But every 4–5 years, my university authorizes faculty to order new machines. I held off for a year but finally pulled the trigger over the summer. After two months of waiting my new MacBook Pro arrived.

The new machine is a 14inch, M3 Pro, 32GB Ram, and other misc bells and whistles. It’s overkill for 99.99 percent of my workload, but for that other 0.01, the extra power and bandwidth will make it worth it. Mostly the few times a year I run large regressions or other data science style work. For what I do right now, I could have gotten an M2 or even less RAM. But since this has to be my work machine for the next 4 to 5 years, I opted to get a little more than I need so I can remain current with whatever new stuff comes up. I figured this was an especially true rule of thumb with the advent of AI. My buddy from grad school already wants me to start playing with Ollama.

Of course, the irony of it arriving today is that I have a hard deadline on an article with a co-author, and I’m taking my oldest camping this weekend with Cub Scouts. Thus, other than a few basic things (email, iCloud, password manager), all the fun stuff of setting up the new laptop will have to wait until next week.