Recently, I’ve been using two MacBooks for personal software development, which has a few people questioning why.

The simple answer is that I already had a MacBook Air sitting around, and its become a useful travel laptop, that allows me to take a minimal development and writing setup with me.

Right now, I’m making use of an M1 Pro MacBook Pro and an M1 MacBook Air. I ended up with these two machines when I was trying to move away from my Intel MacBook Pro, a machine I’ve had for close to 10 years, which was clearly starting to show its age in 2023. Initially, I bought the M1 MacBook Air as a temporary machine until I could get a refurbished M1 Pro MacBook Pro, as my Intel MacBook was incredibly slow at the time.

I bought the M1 MacBook Air from a seller on eBay and discovered that it developed a screen fault during the delivery process. The machine had a single line of dead pixels going down the left side of the screen. After talking to the seller who wasn’t really keen on taking it back, we agreed to me keeping the device and getting a partial refund. After getting the refund, the total cost ended up being £480 (I originally paid £600 for it). Since I didn’t plan on using this device as a long term machine and the fact that the screen defect was barely noticeable, I just used the laptop until I purchased my MacBook Pro with the intentions to sell the Air once I got my MacBook Pro…

I never managed to sell the Air in the end 😅

It ended up sitting in a drawer for a few years until I finally decided to try and get some more use out of it earlier this year. What drove my decision was the fact that I was doing a lot more travelling this year and didn’t feel comfortable taking my main machine with me. I was worried about whether it got lost or even damaged, and didn’t want to take that risk. It was also a little heavier than the Air, which is an important factor to consider if you are trying to travel light.

I factory reset the machine and then set it up with the intention of using it as a light/travel laptop for trips out and about. The smaller form factor and lighter weight has actually made it a great machine to use (I’m currently typing this from a coffee shop I cycled to), and since it’s not my main machine, I’m less concerned about if this machine gets damaged or stolen, given I have a backup of everything on my main laptop and the screen defect is not a massive issue when I only use the Air for software development and writing.

My setup is simple enough to keep synced across two machines:

  • My dotfiles and setup script for having a consistent development experience across machines
  • Bear - For all my writing (synced via iCloud to my other MacBook and my iPhone)
  • Obsidian vault - Synced via iCloud

I don’t expect to add more machines to this setup, but if I did, it would be easy enough to bring another one in. For now, the plan is simply to keep using the Air until it becomes too slow or dies. Maybe I’ll replace the Air with a MacBook Neo one day in the future…