I’ve been running with a desktop as my main computer for almost five months now and I am ready to give some thoughts on how it is going. This is going to be a list post again, so bear with me:
- Having a stationary desktop is really nice in three areas: instant access, stability, multi-monitors. Being able to sit down at my desk at work, have both monitors sitting there, and not moving the machine around so that I don’t break anything is really nice. I can get to work a little bit quicker and be able to see a lot of information when I need it (like troubleshooting our storage servers).
- Oops, there is one more area: storage and expansion. Even with just the Mac mini, I have two external hard drives hooked up and 750 GB of internal storage. Total I have almost 3 TB of storage available whenever I need it. That’s nice.
- Not having access to everything wherever I am in a pain many times. My wife’s MacBook Pro is nice and I have a user account setup for the basic things I need to do from home, but I don’t have all of my pictures on here and the customizations to my development environment need to be synchronized in some other way. I’m fairly certain Apple is not going to bother syncing my .profile anytime soon. Getting the itch to work with Swift has keenly hit me because I have two different environments at work and home.
- As a sysadmin and (hopeful) developer, I still have a need for a laptop … so then I’m working with two different environments at the moment and I’m definitely more comfortable and familiar with OS X than I am with any desktop Linux distributions.
I’m definitely leaning toward picking up a new Apple laptop when it becomes doable and then moving the Mac mini that I have to a server role. OS X Server 4 looks to be an excellent release and I am looking forward to playing with it and seeing if I can fit it into my technology life in some way.
Being able to consolidate down to a single machine running OS X will happen, but I do not know when. With rumors about a 12″ MacBook Air swirling around, and (thanks @curtismchale) Henge Docks working on some amazing products for pseudo-docks, it looks to be doable for me soon. One decision that I will need to make is how important multiple monitors will be.
Then it would be a MacBook Pro with Retina display.