Daily Driver

I’ve been using Windows as a daily driver for as long as I can remember. Some of my favorite photos from my childhood are me sitting my underwear playing Putt-Putt games on the family computer that was running Windows 95. I grew up with Windows and it will always ‘feel like home’ to me.

Around mid-2020, I decided it was finally time to get a new laptop. I had been using an HP Elitebook 840 G1 that was given to me in 2014 as part of my university’s student laptop program. It was a solid machine; I had put in an SSD and an additional 4 GB of RAM, so it could still keep up with most things I threw at it. But its age was starting to show and it was time for a change.

My initial intent was to buy a laptop with the latest and greatest hardware specs and then install a Linux distro on it. The laptops made by System76 were especially appealing. But then the Apple M1 chips caught my eye. I had supported macOS in a professional capacity, but had never used it as my daily driver. The hype around the M1 chips got to me, so I waited for the November 2020 M1 release.

Everything I read about the new 13" MacBook Pro M1’s was great. I was ready to pull the trigger…but then I read about the rumored M1X chips. I could wait a few more months, right? Well a few months turned into a year, but I finally bought my new 14" MacBook Pro when they were released last October.

I’ve been using it for two months now and I love it. Programming and cryptocurrency are my two biggest hobbies, and most courses/tutorials for these topics assume you’re using a Unix-based OS. Not having to start up a VM or be seated at my Ubuntu desktop machine to access the terminal has been great. And this thing is just plain fast; everything opens right away, nothing hangs, and it’s just been a great user experience overall.

So how does buying a new MacBook help me live free? Well, it’s impossible to interact with today’s society without a laptop or phone. Living free is about having choices, and interacting with society gives me the most opportunity to pursue happiness. While I may have just traded one Big Brother for another, Apple at least talks a better game about security and privacy than Microsoft. Linux would have been the best choice from a security and privacy perspective, but the overall user experience with Linux just isn’t quite there yet for me to make it my daily driver. And if I need Linux for something, I have my Ubuntu desktop machine.

When it comes down to it, a MacBook makes the most sense for my threat model. It gives me the power and convenience I’m looking for in a daily driver, but also has it also plenty of tools and features to protect my online privacy.

What do you think? Did I make the right choice going with macOS? Let me know by responding to this post, or you can email me at cypherbean@protonmail.com.