Setting up my Macbook Pro 2020
After a dismal experience with using a Razer Blade Stealth. It's a wonderful machine if only they actually didnt always crash with a BSOD.
At the start of the Circuit Breaker, I ordered a Macbook Air 2020 (10th Gen i7) and quickly realised that it couldnt handle the load of what I needed to do. Firstly it was due to its bad thermal design causing the fan to throttle even on when just browsing the internet,then it gets really hot when running Zoom meetings.
What I needed to do was to be able to create mutiple artboards for design work and do some software development with Python, Javascript,etc. So the most logical choice was to upgrade since my usage will be around design + programming. After much reviewing I ordered the MacBook Pro 2020 configuration:
- 13 inch MacBook Pro 2020
- Processor: 2.0 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5-1038NG7
- Memory: 16 GB 3733 MHz LPDDR4X
- Disk: 512 GB SSD
- Graphics: Intel Iris Plus
After getting a new Machine, first thing I did was to transfer all my current data from the Macbook Air 2020. This can be done by
rebooting the laptop with CMD+R pressed or searching for Migration Assistant via CMD+Space. After the transfer was done, setting it required a few reboots and then signing in with your Apple ID, Touch ID setup. The whole process was pretty straightforward and really easy.
Next, update the OS via System Preferences. To the latest Catalina version.
App Store Apps
Here is a list of App Store Apps that I use:
- Ghostery (Ad blocker for Safari)
- Irvue (for Wallpapers)
- PyCharm / Anaconda
- Slack / Telegram / Whatsapp
- Adobe CC (Photoshop/Illustrator/AfterEffects/InDesign)
- iStatsMenu
- CleanMyMac
- Figma
- XCode
- The Unarchiver
Other Apps
Apps that I downloaded from their website:
Command-Line Setup
Next up, with all MacOSX users you have to install HomeBrew. Before you install HomeBrew though you
need to install the Xcode command line utilities. Open up Terminal and type:
The Command Line Tools Package is a small self-contained package available for download separately from Xcode and that allows you to do command line development in OS X.
Now, install HomeBrew:
Once the installation finishes, run brew help to get all commands, and run brew update to update
to the latest version.
Visual Studio Code Setup
Install VSCode from the official website. Add the binary location
path /Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/bin/ to the PATH. This makes
code comand available from the command line.
This concludes our setup of MacBook Pro for development. Please do let me know, if you have some other interesting ways to setup your machine that could be useful to me and others.