Will I Regret Going To Mba From Mbp?

Hey everyone,

It’s work laptop refresh time. My current setup is a MBP 14-inch, 2023 with 32GB of ram and 1TB of HD space (710GB still available). I use an external studio display running sidecar with an iPad most of the time with Claude at the ready. Here’s a very messy pic of my office to give a sense:

I bike/walk for my commute and I travel about 100 days out of the year and am a light packer. For these reasons, I am very drawn to a lighter machine, but I also am reluctant to give up the security of having a powerful laptop, especially because I anticipate using it for the next three years.

I use Photoshop/Illustrator weekly (but not daily) and when I do the files are sometimes complex. I am starting a podcast at work and we’ll be recording with Riverside. I’m unsure if we’ll be doing the editing or if someone will do that for us, but I’d like to be able to just in case. I’m an AI “power user” in that I experiment with AI agents doing things on my computer. Right now my tools are cloud-based, but I could imagine running a local model in my experiments or as the local models get better. All that said, most of my day-to-day work is a mix of Apple Mail/Notes/Safari, Office Suite, Google Docs, Slack, and Claude.

My wife has a MBA and I am super jealous of how light it is (the laptop and also the brick, which has two USB-C ports, which is also nice for travel). My favorite laptop I’ve ever had was a MBA (circa 2011), hands down, but I do recall running into space/speed issues after a while and getting an iMac to compensate.

So, with the caveat that this is embarrassingly silly to be fraught about in the grander scheme of things, still… I’m torn.

If you’ve read this far, I’d love advice:

• I’m leaning toward the MBA. Talk me into or out of it?
• A small wonder: Worth looking into a Mac Mini + MBA setup?
• I don’t see running two external monitors in my future but I do find myself using up a lot of ports on my Studio Display. I don’t think this would be a problem with the MBA but want a gut check there.
• I’ve not had success with using an iPad solo on trips. My current model is a 3rd gen iPad Pro 11" (circa 2022). Are the newer models more capable of being a travel machine?

Thanks!

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