Living With an M3 Pro MacBook Pro: A 3-Month Reflection On Leaving My 2015 Intel Mac Behind
Leaving Intel Behind and Rediscovering the MacBook with M3 Pro
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For the past eight and a half years, my daily driver was a Mid-2015 MacBook Pro. Equipped with an Intel i7 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage, it saw me through most of my education — three years of high school, four years of undergrad, and an additional year. Even after official software updates stopped with macOS Monterey, I wasn’t ready to part with my Mac, so I installed OCLP to run the latest macOS (Sonoma) update on it.
While there were a few hiccups running Sonoma on an 8-year-old Mac, I didn’t mind them, knowing that OCLP was just an open-source project. However, I became increasingly aware that the macOS experience was slowly degrading. To stop the downhill descent, I finally decided to upgrade to a similarly specced (and hence priced) Mac — the M3 Pro MacBook Pro.
And here we are, three months since I unboxed it and made it my new daily driver. When you upgrade your computer after such a long time, there’s not just one or a few changes to talk about — there’s a truckload. So let’s explore these changes in a more organized and detailed manner…
