For anyone following along with my anxiety ridden indecision about upgrading my work computer, our collective long international nightmare is over.

For context:

• June, 2023: When to Upgrade My Mac - 5 Months Later
• January, 2023: When to Upgrade My Mac - One (mini) Month Later
• December, 2022: Mac Upgrades

What I finally went with was a Mac Studio with these specs:

• Apple M2 Max with 12‑core CPU, 16‑core Neural Engine
• 38‑core GPU ($250 upgrade from the stock 30-core)
• 32GB unified memory
• 1TB SSD storage ($250 upgrade from the stock 512GB)

...for a total of $3,199CAD + tax.

I couldn't decide if the $250 extra 8 cores in the GPU would be beneficial or not to my work, but since you can't upgrade it later I thought I might as well do it now? I hate the way everything is integrated on Macs these days so that every decision you make when buying is a 3-5 year choice you have to live with.

I have a nice Dell 4K monitor I use that the Mac Studio will sit nicely underneath, and my Logitech keyboard and Apple Magic Trackpad are both still good to keep going so no need to upgrade those.

And for now I'm keeping my 2019 16" Intel MacBook Pro to use for portable work, but I could see swapping that out for a 13" M2 MacBook Pro at some point. The iPads are also really enticing, but still early days for Logic Pro on iPadOS for my usage I think.

Since my new Mac Studio arrives sometime in the next couple of weeks, I fully expect Apple to announce M3 based Mac Studios in September. Wah wah

What About the Anxiety?

This is the funny thing for me. I'll stress for months about spending that kind of money on the thing I use 8hrs a day to generate my income, and worry that if I upgrade my computer I won't have money for that surprise vehicle repair bill or kid's dentist visit - but once I've spent the money, the anxiety goes out of my brain. Now if a vehicle breaks down, I don't second guess it and just scramble to find the money - or pull from savings.