Apple began selling refurbished M1 MacBooks at well below their original prices. As they’re as much as $500 below the regular price, these are outstanding options for anyone who wants a laptop with Apple’s speedy M-series processor but don’t have the cash for a new one.
There’s a wide range of used MacBook Air and MacBook Pro units currently in stock at the online Apple Store.
Vincent Belotti, a mechanical engineering student at Farmingdale State College on Long Island, New York, has a colorful setup — and we’re not just talking about his screensaver. He 3D-prints some of the components in it himself, and he can’t get enough decor related to his favorite games.
As an engineering student, Belotti has made 3D printing into a hobby. He uses his MacBook Pro to model and slice prints that become components to enhance his setup. They include an Apple Watch dock, shown on the right side of his desk in these photos, and 3D figurines on the shelf above his monitor.
Tony Walker has been an Apple user since 2003. As a college student in his early 20s, he did his classwork on a 12-inch PowerBook G4 and a 3rd generation iPod during downtime at his graveyard-shift job.
Things have changed a little almost two decades later.
Shad Ahmad was a hard-studying freshman majoring in biology and minoring in history at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
Going home to continue classes for a semester remotely from his parents’ house in Wisconsin may not have been ideal, but Ahmad found a comforting upside. Integrated smart technology makes his life easier, he told Cult of Mac.
Austin, Texas-based photographer Matt Tran initially built his impressive setup to share his pics on Instagram, and you can certainly see a lot of them there. But now he uses his workstation, centered on a MacBook Pro and two monitors of vastly different sizes, to film and edit videos.
“I like having the 38-inch [LG] ultrawide to view the timeline on Final Cut Pro and the smaller, 15.6-inch Desklab portable monitor to review the footage,” he told Cult of Mac.
While the iPad Pro serves as a primary computer for many people, the 12.9-inch version is simply too small. Apple needs to make a 15-inch iPad Pro Max to make the tablet truly useful for power users.
And a bigger screen is only the start. This version should include other top-tier features not found in Apple’s smaller tablets.
David Wilcox is an IT consultant working from home in Bristol, England. His remote work situation means he gets to tweak his setup just as he likes, he told Cult of Mac.
Wilcox’s central command is a 27-inch 5K iMac from 2019. Humming along with it are two 28-inch U2HE850 monitors paired and run together via a Startech Thunderbolt 3 to Dual DisplayPort Adapter.
With that much screen real estate and a plethora of networking gear, he gets a lot done.
“My first computer was a Sinclair [Research] ZX81,” he said, referring to a machine made by Timex Corp. in the United Kingdom starting in 1981. “So this setup is just about a home-computing Nirvana!”
Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based Edward Wang, Ph.D., is an executive director with Quest Diagnostics. He took some serious time and effort making his setup a clean and powerful tool for health care work and audiovisual play. Once he diagnosed and treated a cable-management malady stemming from several separate pieces of computer and audio equipment, his setup delighted him.
Brisbane, Australia-based defense contractor Duncan Shultz loves Dungeons & Dragons. And that’s the main action his Mac-mini-and-wide-screen setup sees, although he also admits to using it to work for a living. An Aasimar Sorcerer’s got to eat, after all.
“The wide screen is simply awesome for my uses,” Shultz told Cult of Mac. “Specifically in running online D&D games. I can have video conferencing, multiple browsers, streaming software and other tools all open and accessible.”
In addition to the aforementioned sorcerer character — goes by the name of Selinth, BTW — Schultz is a dungeon master for Curse of Strahd campaigns, one online and one in person. Online he uses the Roll20 website and in person he uses EncounterPlus for iOS and macOS.
Miami-based Curtis Sponsler has been a 3D animator and motion graphics designer for more than 30 years. These days, that work takes copious amounts of computing power and massive storage capacity.
Fortunately, his current iMac Pro-based setup handles his needs well.
The man even built his own render farm in a closet with dedicated air conditioning to store and cool his video-rendering machines.