With the introduction of field notes after the release of our new website, I had no intention of making the first notes about Apple hardware and software. However, it has turned out this way, due to my enthusiasm for my MacBook Neo and the unexpected way of working it has led to.
The plan was to eventually replace my much-loved MacBook Pro 14″ with the Neo for travelling, and a yet-to-be-released Mac Mini M5 for the office. However, with announcements that the forthcoming macOS 27 Golden Gate will be dropping support for Intel Macs, and some compatibility issues creeping into our daughter’s Intel MacBook Air, I decided to release the MacBook Pro and snap up a 16GB/1TB Mac Mini for £999 (which would now cost £1,299) as a temporary substitute for office work.
This led to a dilemma as to what to use as a substitute for the MacBook Pro’s second screen alongside my main 34″ widescreen, which is my main workspace, with the second screen used for reference. I investigated portrait displays, but these were mostly too big, and I couldn’t find the right smaller screen with a VESA mount.
To get around this, I put the Neo on the Pro’s stand and planned to use it for some reference tasks and to run my timesheet/tech-info FileMaker databases. So I was back to having the iPad Pro to the left of the centralised main 34″ screen and a MacBook to the right, and this time each display had its own dedicated hardware and macOS, with the iPad Pro’s Magic Keyboard making three keyboards in total.
The need for the second screen almost immediately evaporated! I’ve already described how I use the iPad as my secondary reference screen when away from the office in my first field note, using Sidecar, but it’s Universal Control, formerly Handoff, that has saved the cost of a second screen and become such a boost to productivity.
Ironically, Universal Control was originally something of a curse with the previous MacBook Pro and iPad arrangement, as I kept losing my cursor on screen. More often than not it had snuck over to the iPad, even when the iPad had gone to sleep. There’s also a bug where the cursor simply disappears; sometimes this can be resolved by shaking the mouse to reveal the larger cursor, but other times it just won’t reappear, and the only way to find it is by spotting it moving over a menu or dock item despite being invisible.
I’ve frequently turned off Universal Control in the past due to the annoyances it created, but since moving to three separate Apple devices, it has worked beautifully, particularly between the Mac Mini and the MacBook Neo. The only thing I can’t do that I could before is drag a window from the big screen onto the MacBook’s screen, but I’m now able to dedicate tasks to the Neo and swap between apps running on it and the Mini just as easily as I could between the previous two-screen setup.
One example of this being a more productive arrangement is our use of Proof+Geist’s excellent and essential fmPerception database reporting system. We’re currently optimising our Erpyrean manufacturing system and need to analyse all references to various elements within the database files. Fields with many references can take a while to process, so with our multi-user licence I’ll now frequently have the Mac Mini processing one field, the Neo (which doesn’t disgrace itself) processing another, and a Windows PC remote session via the brilliant Jump Desktop processing a third, letting me make decisions up to three times as fast as I could with a single computer. fmPerception remains an Intel-based app, with an Apple Silicon version planned, so it currently runs under Rosetta 2.
Along with iCloud, the Apple ecosystem and this arrangement have completed my transition away from a single expensive laptop to a form of distributed computing I didn’t expect to be using. In my first field note I emphasised the importance of our cloud infrastructure to my way of working, but even without that, the combination of the Mac Mini and MacBook Neo, neither of which is quite the entry-level model, required an investment of £1,331.67+VAT. With the rising cost of RAM this would now come to £1,748.33+VAT, but the minimum-specification MacBook Pro I would have considered would have been £2,082.50+VAT, and could quite easily have ended up at £3,165.83+VAT, yet I believe I now have a more productive setup.
The main thing to watch for when using Universal Control is much the same as when using two displays: check what’s in focus before, say, pressing the backspace key and accidentally erasing content in the wrong app. Yes, I don’t have an M5 Pro processor, nor the amount of RAM I’d expected to include, but so far I see no need to view the Mac Mini as a temporary replacement, particularly now that I have two separate Macs that can operate independently and concurrently.
I now have one task that is essential before I leave the office to work away, which is to disconnect the HDMI cable from the widescreen to the Mac Mini, as remotely accessing a 3440×1440 resolution on a 13″ screen isn’t a lot of fun!