I’M BACK!

This is another one of those blogs where I added a title and never got around to writing anything.  I’m waiting for the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia to start (the first wet race in Bahrain!) so I thought I’d try to find some!

I bought the MacBook Pro M5 Pro back in March, only a few weeks after it was released.  The reality was that I really didn’t need to replace my MacBook Pro M1 that I’d blogged about here, but the MacBook Air from 2020 that my partner was using was beginning to cause her some issues, so I got a new laptop, and she got my old one.  Anyone following this blog will know that’s how technology upgrades work in this house!

The 2020 MacBook Air is the last one with an Intel processor (a 1.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i5) and was a decent enough config with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD, but 6 years is still 6 years, and the Apple M series processors really did change the CPU game back in 2021.  

That’s the real story here.  The M series processors have been released every year, and every year have upped the bar far beyond expectations.  Intel’s performance improvements in the previous 4-5 years had been pretty minimal, but Apple turned that on its head.  It was great for the market, as even though the M series is ARM and not x86-based, it was a real kick in the butt for Intel and also helped AMD, who had pretty much caught up and in many cases exceeded Intel’s performance, albeit for a similar price point.  A few years later, Qualcomm threw their hat into the ring too, with their Snapdragon X1 (now X2) processors, giving people some real viable options with both the traditional x86 instruction set and the newer ARM architecture.

I tested an HP EliteBook X with a Qualcomm processor for around 12 months, and generally enjoyed using the device, although I struggled a little with Windows for ARM, which still has most of the Microsoft Windows issues with an extra sprinkling of ARM-x86 incompatibility.  It was fun to pick up from time to time, but never really became a device I wanted to use over my M1 MacBook.

My job means I always have some of the latest laptops to play with, the current long-term one being an HP EliteBook 6G1a, with an AMD Ryzen 5 230 CPU.  I’d been using that initially with Ubuntu 24.04 and then upgraded to 26.04 when, through a strange quirk of timing, Ubuntu was at the cutting edge of the Linux kernel and one of the first distros to use 7.0.  

That was replaced with Omarchy in August, and there will be a few blogs over the coming weeks (probably months) about my journey with that, as I feel almost like a 10-year full circle from starting this blog back in 2016 (yes, it’s almost 10 years old!)

But what about the M5 Pro?  Is it any good?  Would you recommend it?  As I said at the start, I was quite happy using the M1 Pro for what I use the laptop for, but the M5 Pro is a huge improvement and genuinely feels faster in every way.  It’s still the same design, so other than the M5 Pro being a Space Black one (my M1 Pro was Space Grey – don’t you just love Apple’s colour branding), you wouldn’t know they were different.  The M5 Pro has more RAM (16 > 24GB and faster DDR5), the same 1TB SSD (but it’s about 3x faster in both read and write) and Thunderbolt 5 (although my Dock is only Thunderbolt 4, so not making full use of the 80GB throughput).  There are other improvements that you don’t always appreciate to begin with, too.  My Synology Router isn’t even making full use of Wi-Fi 6, so the Wi-Fi 7 isn’t used at home.  I hadn’t even thought about Bluetooth 5.4 until I went down to make a coffee with my AirPods Pro still in-ear and connecting when my laptop was left upstairs!  I’m sure there are more, but 5 years feels like a pretty good refresh cycle for a laptop these days, whereas as a contractor for almost 20 years (2002-2021) 3 years was my usual cadence.  There’s another sister blog around this in relation to mobile phones too!

I didn’t buy this one from Apple, as within less than a month Amazon were selling the £2199 laptop for just over £2000, and with a new Amazon Barclaycard and 6-month 0% interest, that became £1963.  Amazon made a complete dog’s breakfast of delivering it (I ended up ordering 3 of them!), so I also got a £50 gift card and qualified for over £19 of rewards from the credit card, so in reality it cost less than £1900.  A 13% discount on a less than 1-month-old device is pretty good anyway, but in a backdrop of memory prices increasing by 200-300% across the whole industry, it was too good a deal.  Apple increased the price to £2499 a few months later, so that 13% started to look more like 25%!

The crazy justification one comes up with when spending thousands of pounds on a new laptop 🙂  And with all that said, I’m still sat listening/waiting for the GP to start, typing this on the HP 6G1a running omarchy (the M5 Pro sat downstairs).

Anyway, the GP eventually restarted after a somewhat chaotic start, so that will do for my first blog back after another longer than I would have liked break!  Hopefully Omarchy will be some inspiration for another one in the next few weeks.  Here’s hoping…