Which Mac(s) are you currently you using and how do you like it so far?
- What’s your use cases for the computer? - Do you have any interesting peripherals? - What are some of your favorite Mac apps? - Are there currently any gripes with your setup? If you could change one thing about your Mac, what would it be?
I'll start: Two years ago, I bought the legendary M1 MacBook Air (actually I just checked my receipt, and it will be exactly two years tomorrow!). I'm typing from it right now.
I
I’ll start: Two years ago, I bought the legendary M1 MacBook Air (actually I just checked my receipt, and it will be exactly two years tomorrow, huh!). I’m typing from it right now.
It has truly been amazing since day 1. To me, this computer is an embodiment of the Apple Silicon transition, as it combines an Intel-era body with the new-era M1 chip. Mostly thanks to the overkill heat dissipation and battery, the result is a ridiculously awesome laptop.
I've done a fair share of graphic design, programming, now almost 4 semesters of university studies, and even quite a bit of gaming on this computer. It has taken everything I've thrown at it so far, and I'm sure there's many more years of happy use to come. I wouldn't change it for anything.
Although I'll admit, I'm quite jealous of the M2 kids and their MagSafe port. Two Thunderbolt ports is sometimes just not enough :,)
I’m using the MacBook Air M1, which I bought around the time it came out.
Use case
I mainly use it for my job, which is writing technical documentation. I also code apps, including Mlem, the iOS client for Lemmy and Cork, a GUI for Homebrew.
Sometimes, I also game, mainly Minecraft and Rimworld. The performance is nothing to write home about, but it’s good enough for casual gameplay.
Peripherals
The MacBook is connected to a Thunderbolt 3 dock via a single cable, so the setup is really clean. I then connect everything, including my 4K monitor, mouse and keyboard, three external drives and headphones to the dock. It works perfectly!
Apps
I don’t really use any special apps. 99% of the time, I use built-in apps like Safari, Calendar, Notes etc. One special app that I use more than most is Craft for note taking.
Gripes
I have the base model M1, so that means 8GB of RAM and 256 of storage. The lack of RAM really hurts, I can’t have more than one mildly-demanding app open at one time, and it really slows the entire thing down.
If I could afford it, I would definitely get more than 8GB of RAM.
A fellow M1 MBA connoisseur! 🤝
Yeah, 8 GB can get painful. That's actually one of the few embarrassing aspects of Apple Silicon – even right now, you can still get brand new Macs with M2, but only 8 GB of memory. Like, I understand why it exists, but raising the minimum to 16GB is long overdue at this point.
Thanks for sharing!
You bet that Apple will only include 16GB as a base when it's about as good as 8GB is today. I'm not hopeful at all!
And thank you for sharing your perspective, too :)
M1 MBP as my everyday workhorse. Had the 2019 MBP at work and a Hackintosh at home. Wanted some compact Macbook with the Touchbar. So when the M1s were released, I upgraded to a "proper" Apple device and couldn't be happier.
It's connected to a 32" 4K DELL U3219Q, so nothing fancy.
I'm using it with the Magic Keyboard (small one) with Touchid, a Magic Trackpad and the Magic Mouse. And if I could change a thing, I'd put a Touch Bar on the Magic Keyboard as I really like its versatility. (And, of course, keep it with newer MacBooks as well.)
Fav apps: Strongbox, ShellFish for SSH, Panic Nova, Dash, Fork, Beyond Compare, Hexfiend, Alfred, PCalc, iTerm, Anybox, Downie, Swish, FNable, AirBuddy, News Explorer, MacUpdater, AppCleaner.
Fav Safari extensions: Wipr, Redirect Web, History Book, Rewinder
M2 Air
Use: this is my main work computer, which I use to develop MacOS system software.
Peripherals: a 32-inch 4k display, which I use instead of my laptop screen.
Apps: All I use are Terminal, Firefox, Slack, Outlook, & Zoom.
I wish I worked on Linux. The system would be less opaque.
I'm currently on an M2 MacBook Air, which I got almost the minute they went on sale last summer. It is, hands down, my favorite Mac ever, and I loved my clanky old SE/30 like almost nothing else, so this is saying something (hehe).
I'm using it for client work (graphic design), extremely casual gaming (mostly stuff from Apple Arcade, so Arcade is perfect for me, really), and the usuals: socials, web stuff, etc. etc.
Favorite Mac apps? Hmm. I'm currently playing with MacWhisper, and it just amazes me how good it is, even using the smaller, free-to-use language models. I'm transcribing audio for the husband's online classes, when he posts feedback videos for his students, some of whom would also like a text transcript to accompany his video responses to their in-class posts, and it's just shockingly good.
I live in the Affinity suite (Designer, Publisher, and Photo) most of the day for client work.
What would I change? Hrm. I had a two-port 13" MacBook Pro before this, so I'm used to just the two available thunderbolt ports, but it would be handy to have one more over on the right side of the case, sometimes. Not a major gripe, at all, just a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.
Otherwise, this little guy just runs and runs and runs all day (I get about 15-16 hours on battery, depending on what I'm doing), and it runs everything I can throw at it without blinking. If it ever throttles I literally never notice it.
It really is the best Mac I've ever owned. 🙂
MacWhisperQuickly and easily transcribe audio files into text with OpenAI's state-of-the-art transcription technology Whisper as well as Nvidia Parakeet. Whether you're recording a meeting, lecture, or other important audio, MacWhisper quickly and accurately transcribes your audio files into text.📲 MacWhisper is now also available on iPhone and iPad, download it here.🎁 Get 5 euros off in January by clicking this link.Full Feature List Easily record and transcribe audio files on your Mac Full text and speaker search through all your transcripts System wide dictation with Whisper to replace Apple's own dictation, even with the best Whisper models Just drag and drop audio files to get a high quality transcription Automatically record meetings in Zoom, Teams, Webex, Skype, Chime, Discord and more. Record directly from your microphone or any other input device on your Mac All transcription is done on your device, no data leaves your machine. This makes MacWhisper a great app for sensitive audio such as interviews. Save or export your transcripts as a .whisper file, which includes the original audio and all your transcription edits for easy sharing .srt & .vtt subtitles export as well as csv, dote, docx, pdf, markdown and html exports Metal and GPU support for extremely fast transcription Get accurate text transcriptions in seconds (up to ~30x realtime) Search the entire transcript and highlight words Audio playback synced to transcripts Supports 100 different languages Copy the entire transcript or individual sections Star/Favorite segments Compact mode (hide timestamps) Automatically remove ums, uhhs and other similar filler words Drag and drop directly from Voice Memos Edit and delete segments from the transcript Add up to two speakers manually Inline Video Player Video playback synced to subtitles View multiple language subtitles at once in the videoplayer Select transcription language (or use auto detect) Change playback speed from 0.5 to 3.0x (audio & video) Supported formats: mp3, wav, m4a, ogg, opus, mov and mp4 videos. Adjust whisper settings (beam search / greedy, beam size etc) Supports all Whisper models, some models are only fully available for Pro users ⭐️ MacWhisper Pro All above features Support for Parakeet v2 (for up to 300x realtime transcription at the highest accuracy) on m-series Macs Automatic Speaker Recognition with local models (M-series Macs only) and with ElevenLabs and Deepgram Automatic spelling, punctuation and grammar improvement in dictation mode (requires AI Service to be setup) Batch Transcribe as many files one after the other. Useful if you want to add subtitles to an entire season of a show, or if you have a lot of interviews to go through Support for WhisperKit and Distilled models Integrations with Notion, Make.com, n8n, Zapier, custom webhooks and Obsidian to automatically forward your transcripts Transcribe YouTube videos Realtime captions / subtitles with live translation. Can be used with the microphone or system audio. Watch Folder support to automatically transcribe files when they are added to a directory of your choice. The files can automatically be transcribed into a variety of formats. Support for OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), Groq, Ollama, XAi, Deepseek, Custom OpenAI API endpoints and Azure AI models for easy prompting Support Cloud Transcriptions through OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Groq and custom Whisper servers Manually add speakers to your transcript for a cleaner export Menubar app for accessing Whisper anywhere from your Mac Global, access MacWhisper from anywhere in a spotlight type view for instant transcription and easy pasting into other apps ChatGPT integration (with your own API key) Ignore segments such as [SILENCE] from appearing in your transcripts Supports GPT4, GPT4 Turbo, GPT4o and GPT4o-mini as well as older models Anthropic Claude Integration (with your own API key) Record and transcribe system audio (to record meetings for example) Supports Tiny (English Only), Tiny, Base, Small, Medium and Large (V2 and V3) models Add your own custom GGML models Change the starting timestamp for the transcript Translate audio file into another language through Whisper (use the Medium or Large models, the results will not be perfect and I'm working on more advanced ways to do this) Translate the full transcript by adding your own (free) DeepL API key. Translate subtitles into different languages Inline and separate video player with subtitle and multiple translated subtitles support Transcribe podcasts by combining single track audio for each host (beta) One time payment, no subscription. Pay once and use forever. Higher priority support. I'll try to email you back as soon as possible if you run into anything. If you're a journalist, student or non-profit, send me an email at [email protected] and tell me about your work to get 25% off 🙂 If you purchase MacWhisper Pro and are not happy with it, let me know within 7 days what could be improved and I'll refund you. Support for OpenRouter Support for ElevenLabs Scribe and Deepgram Nova After downloading MacWhisper you will have to fill in your license key to unlock all Pro features.If you want to purchase more than 20 licenses, or if you're looking for an MDM deployment or something custom, please send an email to [email protected] or check out the MDM Documentation.100+ Supported LanguagesMacWhisper can transcribe audio in the following languages:English, Chinese, German, Spanish, Russian, Korean, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish, Polish, Catalan, Dutch, Arabic, Swedish, Italian, Indonesian, Hindi, Finnish, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Greek, Malay, Czech, Romanian, Danish, Hungarian, Tamil, Norwegian, Thai, Urdu, Croatian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Latin, Maori, Malayalam, Welsh, Slovak, Telugu, Persian, Latvian, Bengali, Serbian, Azerbaijani, Slovenian, Kannada, Estonian, Macedonian, Breton, Basque, Icelandic, Armenian, Nepali, Mongolian, Bosnian, Kazakh, Albanian, Swahili, Galician, Marathi, Punjabi, Sinhala, Khmer, Shona, Yoruba, Somali, Afrikaans, Occitan, Georgian, Belarusian, Tajik, Sindhi, Gujarati, Amharic, Yiddish, Lao, Uzbek, Faroese, Haitian Creole, Pashto, Turkmen, Nynorsk, Maltese, Sanskrit, Luxembourgish, Myanmar, Tibetan, Tagalog, Malagasy, Assamese, Tatar, Hawaiian, Lingala, Hausa, Bashkir, Javanese, Sundanese.System RequirementsMacWhisper requires a lot of computer memory to work well. To use the Medium and Large models your Mac should have more than 8GB of RAM. Performance on older Intel based Macs can also be bad but I have not been able to test this properly.Privacy Policy and Terms of UseReviews👨💻 Check out my other macOS utilities:OpenAI Bundle - Get all my OpenAI apps at a discounted rateMacGPT - Use ChatGPT on your Mac and from your menubarDetective - GPT Vision for macOSVoices - High Quality Text to Speech with OpenAIText Assistant - Generate useful text and manage your prompts with GPT and your own OpenAPI keyVivid - Double the brightness of your MacBook Pro by always using HDR modeForehead - Hide the Notch and round your MacBook cornersCooldown - Quickly toggle Low Power Mode from your menubarSpeedy - Fast Speedtest in your menubarPippo - Improve the Picture-in-Picture video player with seek controlsWhisper was made by building on top of all the hard work from Georgi Gerganov, check out his Whisper implementation here: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp
currently writing this from my 16" M1 Pro, great laptop, it is a bit big and heavy tho
i got it as a starting uni gift so its been mainly used for homework and other internet dumbshittery and a bit of lightroom
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]
jiggles
lFenix
Hal_Canary
wchanley
esty