It says on the Apple Store that they’ll  give me $450 for my current M2 MacBook Air as a trade-in on a new 15″ M5 model. This Air has been a good soldier, but I’ve had a couple of small issues with it restarting itself randomly (this seems to have cured itself with some of the latest software updates), wired keyboards randomly disconnecting themselves, and Safari choking after a day or so of constant use. This last issue may be related to the fact that it only has 8GB of RAM, something I’ve been bumping into constantly as I do more and more video editing. The machine I spec’d out starts with 16GB, has a comparable hard drive, and jumps three generations in chip design, plus the extra screen size. I think, once I get to my next pay period, that I’m going to upgrade to a better machine.

Meanwhile, Apple quietly discontinued the Mac Pro last week, their last tower-based enclosure. I’ve got two Mac Pro towers here at the house, a 2010 model stuffed with 22TB of storage for all of our family data, and a 2012 model with 32TB of storage for work video and photos. They are absolute tanks, but their OS is limited to their architecture—which means the 2010 is running 9-year-old software. When it’s time to retire them, I’m going to have to find a modern Mac Pro for sale somewhere or splurge on a NAS of some kind, I guess. The Synology NAS I’m running at work has been solid, but was not cheap.