Bits and bytes and stickers

I make my weird cerebral living on a laptop, often hooked to a large monitor. I used to have a dedicated machine for the large monitor, but about five years ago I got fed up with dragging my digital life between two places and consolidated.

I could only make that move because I found a way to keep playing spiffy high-power games on the laptop: I bought an eGPU, and stuck that between the large monitor and the lappy. Now I could use the eGPU to render a zillion triangles a second in the universe of Skyrim, and then disconnect from it and ride out to a cafe, and sip expensive coffee as I compute around my fellow monks. The best of both worlds.



Apple moved away from the Intel chip quite a while ago, and the eGPU needs an Intel chip to operate. So I was stuck with the same laptop for five years. That's five years of very hard use. That lappy has been hauled in a bicycle bag around nine countries, and it's been a workhorse at home. During the COVID summer of 2020, I hauled it to the park by the Campanile with two giant batteries and ran the thing full blast all day, draining both batteries and the internal one in about six hours, for five days each week.



Now the thing heats up in an instant, and throttles way down and stays there. Detaching from the eGPU means shutting the machine entirely down, or it will crash as soon as I close the lid. Last month I left it on the desk compiling code and when I returned five minutes later it was frozen with the screen off, requiring a hard reset. After a dozen more episodes just like that, I was finally convinced to upgrade.

But that means throwing away the eGPU. You just can't use an eGPU with an Apple chip. It's architecturally impossible. You can't even run an ARM version of Windows 11 in a virtualized environment and plug the eGPU into that. If you move to one of their new laptops, your tin can full of space-age 3D pixie dust shuts down and transforms into a little trophy, rewarding you for participating in the march of obsolescence. It does still generate waste heat though, so your cat will enjoy lounging on it.

So I spent a ridiculous amount of money, and bought a 14-inch M2 laptop with 12 cores and a hilarious amount of memory. It weighs slightly more than the old one, which annoys me a great deal. But I'm rolling with it because none of Apple's lighter machines can deal with sustained workloads.



Just today I began the process of migrating the stickers over, because after four days of testing I was finally convinced that I could do what I needed with this new machine.



Two things about it impress me way beyond what I was expecting:

The battery lasts a long, long time. I'm used to my old lappy going critical in about two hours. This machine uses tiny amounts of power. I have no idea how long it really takes to drain the battery because I haven't gotten it down by even half, after working with it all day.

And dang, the speed increase is just shocking. I opened one of my old projects in VSCode the other day - five hundred interconnected F# files - and instead of churning full-blast in Ionide for two minutes to resolve all the symbols in the editor like the old machine did, it fired up all 12 cores in one huge burst and the symbols resolved in ten seconds, and then it dropped back to low power. The case registered a tiny increase in heat, which went away without the fans even turning on. Things have changed in five years...

There's more real estate for stickers on this machine, and some of the old ones feel played out. Time to go hunting again!