For the last year, absent an even semi-reasonable work-from-home set up, I’ve been working in and out of cafes across town. It’s okay, but it leaves you feeling like a vagabond, always thinking about whether you’ve bought a coffee recently enough for the workers/owners to not be metastasizing latent resentment towards you, and always negotiating for wi-fi and bathroom codes.
Last week I finally got sick of it and got WeWork. Paired with a shiny new gym membership, it’s had the major benefit of letting me build in a morning run commute, guaranteeing daily exercise, and leaving me with an intense mental acuity for the first couple hours of the day, an effect now attributed to endocannabinoids that are part of the runner’s high.
Modern technology is great. I have WeWork All Access, meaning I can’t leave anything at the office. My pack contains deoderant, a change of clothes, and three pieces of technology:
The M1 (paired with an eye on Activity Monitor for power offenders) gives me all-day power and then some. I don’t carry charging cables or any other peripherals. The grotesqueries which were the butterfly keyboard and Touch Bar are finally dead, so no external keyboards required. With built-in retina display, fast Cmd-Tab, and good window management I don’t miss an external monitor.
This seems obvious, but even five years ago it would’ve been a pipe dream. All this technology is cool, but I have to give the tech-of-the-decade award to the M1, which came out of left field, and has fundamentally changed the expectations around responsiveness and power requirements in computation.