2 min read Devices

No Longer Pro

I have always bought the Pro everything. This past year everything switched.
The hero image of the Sky Blue Macbook Air from Apple.

I have always bought the Pro everything. Pro iPhone, Pro MacBook, Pro iPad. It was just the only option—if there was a better version, I got the better version.

This past year everything switched. My main phone is now an iPhone Air. My daily laptop is a MacBook Air. Neither are Pro. Both are perfect.

The Shift

In the past, you had to have the biggest and baddest SKUs from Apple to get the bleeding edge features and performance. That's just not the case anymore.

The Air line used to mean lesser in the name of lighter. Slower chips, fewer features, the "budget" option dressed up nice. Now? The gap has shrunk to nearly nothing for most use cases.

The New Reality

Pro used to mean "professional" and specs-wise it meant the best by an order of magnitude that you could actually feel. Now it really just means “more." More camera, more screen, more battery, more cores, more weight, more cost. And more isn't always better.

The primary driver of this new reality is the switch away from 3rd party chips to Apple's own in-house M-series chips. The CPU, GPU and other specialty cores of M-series chips are the same speed across the variants in the family. Apple generally releases them as M-, M- Pro, M- Max and M- Ultra where each larger edition just has more of each type of core. The cores are the same size and speed, but the are just more of them. For most people we really don’t need to have massive core count that comes with a Max/Ultra chip. Using Chrome and FaceTime is not going to feel faster because you have a 32-core CPU and 80-core GPU in your M3 Ultra. Compiling code, rendering 8K videos or running larger local AI models are what you’d need to be doing to feel the additional cores flexed.

What I Carry

iPhone Air — A phone that is truly thin in a way that makes other phones feel hilariously huge. The same power as the iPhone 17 Pros in a chassis that feels impossible (without the cooling, cameras and battery that comes with a larger body). The camera is more than good enough for everyday shots. No telephoto or ultra-wide but, I use my phone for quick captures of the moment and not for artistic endeavors.

MacBook Air — M4, 24GB RAM, Sky Blue. Handles Xcode, Zed, as many browser tabs as I need, Slack, and whatever else I throw at it all without getting work (even without a fan). It doesn't sweat. The battery lasts forever and it goes everywhere with me and lasts a literal day of usage for me.

Neither one is a “Pro.” And now neither needs to be. My daily carry is SO much lighter now and I love it.

I Still Have the Big Ones

Let me be clear—I haven't gone minimalist. I still have powerful machines where it matters.

At my desk sits a Mac Studio with an M4 Max and 64GB of RAM. When I need to render, compile, or push hardware, I have hardware to push.

For photography, I carry a Ricoh GR III. The iPhone camera is great, but when I want to take real photos, I use a real camera.

The difference is: these stay put and are called up when I need them. The Mac Studio lives on my desk. The Ricoh comes out when I'm intentionally shooting. Neither needs to be in my pocket every day.