The Downgrade

At AWS London Summit I was standing on the lower level of London Excel with my personal MacBook Pro M1 balanced on my arm, deploying 20 workshops, when someone tried to get my attention. Before I knew it the MacBook was somersaulting through the air onto the event centre floor.

The external shell is worse for wear, warped on one side, and it’s clearly time for a replacement. I travel with a personal laptop because I’ve been fine with virtual desktops for work since the Sun Ray days, log in and pick up from where you last stopped working. A VDI client doesn’t need a monster spec, so the plan was to downgrade to a MacBook Neo: enough to watch a series on a plane, enough connectivity to reach much more powerful systems in AWS.

What I hadn’t reckoned with is how popular the Neo turned out to be. Not quite G4 iMac popular, but popular enough that I could have the latest M5 MacBook Pro delivered in a quarter of the time. Except I’ve become allergic to dropping expensive things on concrete floors.