And why I was wrong.
For two years I had four reasons not to buy a MacBook. Three of them were really nonsense. The fourth was team loyalty, which is also nonsense but takes longer to admit.
This is what six months on the laptop I’d been complaining about on photographer forums actually taught me. Mostly that I’ve been wrong on the internet, which is somehow always more painful than just being wrong by yourself.
I’m Jim. I shoot photos and video on the beaches in Da Nang. This is not a benchmark video — there are plenty of those, made mostly by people with a desk full of laptops they actually did not pay for. I paid for this one with my own money, after being annoying as hell about MacBooks for years. So I’m a slightly biased witness in the direction of please let this purchase have been a good idea.
It was a good idea. Annoyingly.
What I was on before
I was on a Dell XPS 15 9520. Better specs on paper than the MacBook I eventually bought. More cores, more RAM, more ports. That’s the part that kept me on Windows for an extra eighteen months. I trusted the spec sheet. The spec sheet had no idea what it was talking about, and to be fair, neither did I.
The biggest lie I believed was the one you can measure.
Daily editing on the Dell looked like this. I’d open DaVinci Resolve, and the first half-hour was not editing. The first half-hour was workarounds. I’d flip the timeline down to 1080p. I’d build proxies. I’d drop playback to half quality. And then, if I was lucky, I’d get twenty minutes of work before the laptop overheated and restarted.
Self-editing means puzzling. You can’t puzzle in twenty-minute chunks — you can only forget where you were.
So I bought an external cooling fan. Then I bought a second one when the first one wasn’t enough. I told myself this was a normal thing photographers do.
I cannot stress enough that it is not.
What it looks like now
Daily editing on the MacBook looks like this. I open DaVinci Resolve. Native 4K timeline, no proxies, a Dehancer adjustment layer on top with bloom and halation and the full film look. Twenty frames per second of live playback. Sometimes more. Even on battery.
The lid does not get warm. I haven’t taken the external cooling fan out of my bag in six months. It’s still in there like a souvenir from a country I don’t want to visit again.
That alone changed my creative life — which is a sentence I’d normally only use to be dramatic. Sorry. Before, the laptop stayed at home most days. It was tied to the speakers, the hard drives, the cooling rig — basically a desktop pretending to be portable, the same way I was pretending to be a mobile creator.
Now I close the lid, slide the 14-inch into a sleeve, and work from a coffee shop. I open the lid in a new spot and the system is exactly where I left it. No restart, no data loss, no five-minute boot during which I question my life and my career. That sounds small. Six months in, it’s the single biggest difference in how much I actually enjoy creating.
The four fears
Now about the migration fears. This is the part where I have to admit I was wrong on almost all accounts in front of all of you with my full chest.
Fear one: dongles and the locked ecosystem. I’d been told for years that switching to a Mac meant re-buying everything. New software, new peripherals, a drawer full of dongles that would cost a small mocking iPhone in the corner of my desk. Instead, my Windows mouse just plugged in. Right-click works. I did not buy a new one. My old Sennheiser Bluetooth earbuds paired in seconds. DaVinci Resolve installed seamlessly. Capture One Pro works. Photoshop works — the whole Adobe stack reinstalled, signed in, and ran. Net cost outside the laptop itself: zero. I’d been preparing for years to pay a tax that did not exist.
Fear two: hard drives. I run two externals — a 2TB SSD and a 4TB spinning USB drive. The SSD plugged in, read, write, copy — all fine. The honest thing, because I owe you: I plugged in the 4TB. The Mac said read only. It’s NTFS, and Mac reads NTFS but doesn’t write to it without third-party software. I can pull files from it, not put files on it. So that’s one Sunday I’m not getting back. It’s solvable — reformat, migrate, done. But I’m not pretending it isn’t friction.
Fear three: the apps. This is where it got embarrassing. Apps now release on Mac first, often by months. The new ChatGPT browser. Cloud Code, the thing I use to script half of my videos on this channel. All of it lands on Mac before Windows. I had spent years assuming Mac users were the second-class citizens. Turns out they were getting early access while I was waiting for installers that didn’t exist yet. This is the kind of discovery that makes you reexamine your whole life. And then you close the tab.
Fear four: gaming. I told myself a Mac would lock me out of Steam. Steam runs on Mac. The hardware imports more games every quarter. It’s not the Windows experience for gaming, and I’m not pretending it is — but for someone who plays one or two hours a week to wind down, it is more than enough. Which is, in retrospect, all I ever needed it to be.
The bigger pattern
The chip is more efficient. The fans rarely come on, and when they do, they sound polite. I get three to four hours of heavy editing on battery alone. The 14-inch is the right size for a traveling creator — small enough to disappear in a bag, big enough to dock into two external monitors at home. If you’re stationary, get the 16. If you move, get the 14 and dock it. That’s the only piece of actual buying advice in this whole post.
The pattern, the only line in this post that comes close to a moral: it’s not that the Mac does new things. It’s that, for me at least, it removes friction from the things I was already doing.
Gear in this post
This is the kit. The Amazon links are tagged — using them costs you nothing extra and funds the next video. The Dehancer code knocks 10% off your license. The Artlist link gives new members two free months. None of this changes the post — I’d recommend the same kit either way.
- Apple MacBook Pro 14 — M4 Max, 36GB, 1TB — the new laptop
- Sennheiser earbuds — the ones that just paired
- 2TB Portable SSD — the drive that just worked
- Dehancer Film Plugin — color grade, code
JIMGROOTESfor 10% off - Artlist — music, +2 free months for new members
- Huddle — the app I built to pull video angles out of journal entries. Free trial.
The cooling fan is still in my bag, by the way. In case I have to apologize to it later.
— Jim
Affiliate disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. The Dehancer, Artlist, and Huddle links above are also affiliate links — using them costs you nothing extra, sends a small kickback my way, and funds the next video.