About 6 years into making a living from programming, one day while surfing the web

my eyes locked onto an incredibly gorgeous, dazzling machine.

"Sony VAIO SZ18"

I stared blankly at the SZ18's dazzling looks for a long while without thinking.

I never really liked laptops to begin with. It was a completely indifferent machine to me..

One rainy summer day..

without thinking much, I started the car and just drove to Yongsan.

And at one store I bought the VGN-SZ18 model.

My impression using the SZ18 was one of the finest devices I've owned in my life.

The build quality was really excellent, and for its time the design was so refined..

saying "of course, Sony!!" I even set aside my desktop for a while and did programming on it.

I babbled "this is a beautiful machine~" and truly cherished it.

After that I went on to buy the SZ38 and then the SZ48 in succession.

The SZ series was a perfect laptop.

After that I also bought Sony's high-spec netbook, the TZ series..

The money I spent on laptops back then was enormous. But I still had no worries.

I don't now(ㅠㅠ), but at that time I was earning good money, and since I made a living from computers,

I thought a person shouldn't hesitate about buying computers..

After that I saw a MacBook. Ah, the MacBook was amazing too..

Fortunately I didn't buy the MacBook with my own money but with company money(-_-), so that was my first time using macOS.

The solid, white-bodied MacBook had a Core2Duo performance that was good on its own, but the build quality

was on a whole different level from DELL, Samsung, and other laptops of the time.

The only Apple product I'd ever used before was programming on an Apple II,

and the first time I used OSX, I was truly surprised by one thing.

That it's an OS in the authentic lineage of the UNIX system.

I've used Linux since the 90s when Slackware and Red Hat were just emerging,

and since I'd always had a certain admiration for authentic UNIX, I was quite astonished.

That's what made me love Mac even more.

After destroying the SZ48 in a marital spat.. I spent some time using company-funded MacBook, DELL, and Lenovo devices,

and then one day..

I briefly turned my eyes back to Sony.

And huh? The SZ series had disappeared.

Surprised, I wondered what happened and looked to see if some other new model had come out,

and lo and behold..

the VAIO Z series..

Wow, honestly...

"Oh, I have to buy this" just slipped out of my mouth.. so that same day I took a half-day off work

and drove straight back to Yongsan.

And I really did all my programming for an entire year using only the VAIO Z laptop.

After that I took good care of it and sold it. Even after using it for almost 2 years,

the person who bought it secondhand said 'it looks brand new,' since I'd cleaned, tightened, and oiled it daily like new,

which satisfied both me and the buyer.

After that, personally, I stopped buying laptops after the Intel MacBook Pro 15-inch.

It was also around when laptops from companies started becoming common,

and personally, after getting married and having kids, I felt increasingly strapped for cash(-_-),

so it became hard to just casually buy one..

Then the occasion for buying a laptop once more came unexpectedly with Samsung's Galaxy Book Pro.

Since VAIO split off from Sony, it felt like it wasn't the same brand value anymore, so I stopped even looking at it,

and then..

Samsung's Galaxy Book Pro unexpectedly gave off the feel of the old Sony VAIO Z series.

Great finish and quality.. light and thin.. plus a wonderfully excellent OLED screen

The Galaxy Book2 Pro gave me the same excitement I felt when I bought the Aladdin PC back in the day.

Right now this laptop is being used exclusively by my wife. She's very satisfied with it too.

The Intel 12th-gen CPU still seems like a good-position CPU.

My experiences buying development laptops in the past have become memories in my life,

and now I've turned 50.

Going forward in my life, I'll probably buy laptops maybe 2 more times, at most 3.

I'm not programming as much as before, and I feel like the age to retire as a programmer

is approaching, so I think I should just make good use of the equipment I already have,

and if I do buy again, I want to buy a good product and use it for a long time.

My desktop specs are AMD 5950x with a GeForce 3080, 64GB DDR4.

I don't think I'll change this much either,

I feel like I'll keep using the current spec for at least 5 more years.

A while ago I pre-ordered an M5 Pro MacBook Pro.

It's an 18-core CPU with 48GB RAM, 2TB SSD spec, a pretty expensive model.

Looking at the trend of performance improvement and usage from M1 to M5,

I think this model will keep being usable even after MacOS support ends.

At that point I can just install Linux on it.

I agonized a lot over whether to buy the M4. Based on my long experience buying hardware and developing system software,

I judged that...

everything about the M4 was excellent, but its adoption of a PCIe bus that felt out of step with the times causing

reduced IO speed bothered me.

So I waited for the M5 Pro, and sure enough it came out fixing all of the M4's shortcomings.

I judge the M5 Pro to be the most complete CPU of the current generation across all PCs.

Compute performance, IO performance, power consumption...

with a memory bandwidth exceeding 300GB and excellent SSD speed too.

It's an all-around beautiful CPU, good at everything.

And since it's the last generation of this platform, I think its build quality will be high too.

This is my first time ever personally buying a computer with an ARM CPU with my own money.

I used the M2 Pro for development at my company, and that was excellent too.

I also love building custom desktops.. but I really love these finished machines too.

If I had the money, I'd also want to buy an HP Z Workstation for a desktop.

Anyway, I'm excited about what I'll end up developing on this new MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro.

I'm pretty weak in web programming. Since I've mostly worked in C/C++ for game development and game servers,

or various miscellaneous servers.. and OS-system-related programming,

I've somewhat neglected web programming.

I'd like to try web programming with this too, and pull out the M5 Pro's GPU performance using METAL,

maybe..

I'd also like to study AI using the desktop's GeForce 3080 and the laptop's M5 Pro GPU together.

It's been a long time since I've felt this excited about what I'll develop with a new laptop.