My return to being a two-Mac guy really worked out for me

My Mac history is … fairly lengthy, starting with the original Macintosh when it launched way back in 1984. I’m not sure I could even reliably count the number of models I’ve owned since then.

For most of the time since, I’ve owned one Mac at a time. There was a previous period when I owned two Macs, and a return to that approach last year has really paid off …

Becoming a two-Mac guy: Round one

I’ve always been a fan of laptops over desktops. That’s partly because I used to do a lot of business travel, but I also appreciate the option of coffee shop usage and the flexibility of being able to move the machine between a home office and living room.

I do, though, want to have the largest possible screen, and don’t want to sacrifice power for portability, so that’s so far put me firmly in the camp of the largest MacBook Pro available. Back in the Intel days, that meant the 17-inch MBP.

That was my only Mac for a few years, until I did a cycling holiday in the Netherlands. I wanted to carry a Mac both for interfacing with my Garmin GPS unit for route planning each day and to write a daily blog of the trip. Since there was not the slightest possibility of fitting my MacBook Pro into my very sleek panniers, I ended up buying an 11-inch MacBook Air as a second machine.

The two-Mac life had both pros and cons. The obvious advantage was being able to choose between a heavy and powerful machine and a small and light one, depending on my needs on the day. The primary disadvantage was the need to replicate my setups on both machines.

That meant installing almost all my third-party apps on each, as well as each of the various utilities I used to make my life easier. Syncing two Macs was also nothing like as straightforward as it is in today’s cloud-based world, so there was definitely an administrative overhead to this approach.

Going back to being a one-Mac guy

Fast-forward to 2016. I could have held out with my then-aging 17-inch MacBook Pro a year or two longer, but the opportunity to update to a much sleeker 15-inch MacBook Pro proved too great a temptation to resist.

Size- and weight-wise, this sat somewhere between the 11-inch MBA and the 17-inch MBP, and I decided it was sufficiently portable that it no longer made sense to own two machines. By the time it was replaced with the 16-inch model, I still had the same view that the degree of portability was good enough.

I very much appreciated only having a single Mac to maintain, even if syncing machines was very much easier by then. (Technically I remained a two-Mac guy as my MacBook Air went into a drawer as an emergency backup machine, but I literally never used it, so don’t count that.)

I might have remained a one-Mac guy forevermore, but for that old MBA refusing to boot up when I went to lend it to a neighbour. Since it was mostly still a backup device, I couldn’t justify buying a new one, so last year bought a five-year-old 13-inch M1 MacBook Air.

Becoming a two-Mac guy: Round two

I didn’t expect to use the MacBook Air very much, but found myself surprised. It was actually lighter than the iPad Air and Magic Keyboard combo I occasionally used when I wanted something more portable for mobile use. Since I greatly prefer a Mac to an iPad, it was a no-brainer to switch to the MBA on those occasions.

I’d gotten so used to the size and weight of my 16-inch MBP that I didn’t expect to use the MBA very often. However, when I did, I found that it was dramatically more portable in two respects.

First, the size was significantly more practical in places where space is at a premium. The main examples here are seatback tables on planes and trains.

Second, the weight of the MBA was almost imperceptible when slipped into a backpack to carry around with me. When I visited Niagara Falls, for example, I added the MacBook to my backpack and was glad I did.

If I’m out all day sightseeing, I typically use a slim backpack to carry a few essentials: a compact umbrella if it might rain, a sweater if the temperature is changeable, a Kindle if I’m traveling on a Metro, a water bottle, and a travel mug (I’m a Brit – we can go an absolute maximum of one hour without tea).

What I found was that the MacBook Air was so light that I barely noticed when I slipped this in too. That meant I got to put the Niagara video together on the train ride back to the city. It was a really great use of the time given the view from the train was mostly rather industrial, and I’d seen it all on the way out. I honestly wasn’t aware of any extra weight or bulk while wandering around.

Now a firm fan of this approach

Having made the switch from iPad to MacBook Air for mobile use, there was no going back. Even with iPadOS 26 making the device more Mac-like, the real thing still wins out for a number of reasons.

• More powerful apps
• More usable on my lap (the iPad with Magic Keyboard feels less balanced)
• All the utilities on which I’ve come to rely
• Overall comfort and familiarity with the UI
• Lighter than the 12.9–inch iPad with Magic Keyboard

I’ve since used the MacBook Air a lot more than I ever expected to. That trip to Toronto demonstrated that it was perfectly viable to rely on the smaller and lighter machine over my MacBook Pro when traveling. I’ve since done the same for a number of long weekend trips, and it has continued to be a perfectly satisfactory approach.

The lightness of the device has also enabled me to simply slip it into a backpack on occasions when I may or may not want to use it. There’ve been times, for example, when I’ve had a meeting followed by a bit of time to kill before a social event in the evening. If I’m taking a backpack anyway, then it’s no extra effort to slip the MBA into the laptop compartment just in case I want to do a spot of writing in a coffee shop.

Having invested the initial time needed to get the machine properly set up, it’s now my default choice for mobile use. So far the only exceptions have been occasions when I was doing some meatier video editing away from home, when I appreciated the greater power and larger screen size of my MacBook Pro.

Where do you stand on this? Are you a one-Mac or two-Mac person, and why? Please take our poll and share your thoughts in the comments.

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