I got tired of complaining about my old laptop (and it was falling apart), so I got a spiffy new M2 Macbook Air. It’s pretty nice. I’m not thrilled about dropping from a 15″ screen to 13″, but eh, I’ll live with it. The Pros are getting out of my price range anyway. I’m still getting used to the keyboard and touch pad just because they’re so different from my old 2010 MBP, but they definitely work well, I just have to break the habit of pressing hard because my old pad had gotten so stiff. Another thing to get used to is that there’s basically no gap between the pad and the keyboard, where I used to rest my fingers a lot.
I figured I’d give Minecraft a whirl and thought I’d be a clever boy and get one of the native ARM Java distributions for setting up modded instances, no Rosetta for me! And then it tries to load native LWJGL libraries, which are still x64 for older Minecraft versions, so back to Rosetta after all… Still, it managed to get 30-50ish FPS under Rosetta with a heavy 1.7.10 modpack, not too shabby. The latest Minecraft version is supposed to be fully native so maybe I can experiment with mixing libraries.
One annoyance so far was that as part of initial setup, it asked what I wanted to sync with iCloud, and I unchecked everything I could. But later on, after migrating files over, I got an email telling me that my iCloud storage was now full. I can’t remember if it was even part of that initial setup, but apparently it had just gone and synced Photos by default. Then, after deleting them in iCloud, you get a scary email about how you’d better redownload the originals from iCloud because they’re no longer on your device, but I double-checked and they are still on the laptop. I think that message is mainly for phones and tablets?
And, it was a bit odd that when moving some files around by command-line, even Terminal would pop up with prompts like “Terminal wants to access the files in Documents. Do you want to allow this?” It only asks once and only for the ‘major’ folders, at least. (Since my MBP was stuck all the way back on High Sierra, I still have to get used to all the OS changes since then too.)
Other miscellaneous bits: dang, it’s small and light. The notch is weird but not a big deal, full-screen apps just don’t use that area. The speakers are definitely louder than my old MBP, where even max volume was a bit too quiet in some videos and streams. I kinda wish the magsafe plug was the L-shaped one instead of straight-on, but that’s just due to how my space is set up. I’m still amazed by being able to open Calibre in four seconds instead of a full minute.