I'm currently on an M2 MacBook Air, which I got almost the minute they went on sale last summer. It is, hands down, my favorite Mac ever, and I loved my clanky old SE/30 like almost nothing else, so this is saying something (hehe).

I'm using it for client work (graphic design), extremely casual gaming (mostly stuff from Apple Arcade, so Arcade is perfect for me, really), and the usuals: socials, web stuff, etc. etc.

Favorite Mac apps? Hmm. I'm currently playing with MacWhisper, and it just amazes me how good it is, even using the smaller, free-to-use language models. I'm transcribing audio for the husband's online classes, when he posts feedback videos for his students, some of whom would also like a text transcript to accompany his video responses to their in-class posts, and it's just shockingly good.

I live in the Affinity suite (Designer, Publisher, and Photo) most of the day for client work.

What would I change? Hrm. I had a two-port 13" MacBook Pro before this, so I'm used to just the two available thunderbolt ports, but it would be handy to have one more over on the right side of the case, sometimes. Not a major gripe, at all, just a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.

Otherwise, this little guy just runs and runs and runs all day (I get about 15-16 hours on battery, depending on what I'm doing), and it runs everything I can throw at it without blinking. If it ever throttles I literally never notice it.

It really is the best Mac I've ever owned. 🙂

They don't snap in the current Sonoma beta for me, unless I'm really missing something (always a possibility). I don't mind the existence of Stage Manager on macOS, and I can see its utility for some folks (people who don't use Spaces/multiple desktops, for example), or folks for whom a window-centric way of working makes more sense to them than an app-centric one.

I've been a Mac user since the late Paleolithic and hiding and showing apps feels too ingrained in my head for it to change at this point. hehe. So long as things like Stage Manager add to the Mac user experience rather than replace longstanding conventions, I don't mind.

But then, even those longstanding conventions change, sooner or later. (OS X is not classic Mac OS, of course.) I'll adapt; it'll just feel unusual for a while, in the meantime.