Tech Stack

I've had an iPhone since the iPhone 2, and the 15 Pro Max is up there with my favorites. I usually swap every 3 years and I'm due this year — but this one still feels new in a way past models didn't at the same age. It's been a workhorse and is still kicking.

Battery holds up beautifully through a full day, the camera is great, and the action button is one of those small upgrades I never realized I wanted — I use it constantly. The lone gripe: it runs noticeably warm under load (heavy Claude remote-control work especially). Never hot enough to put it down, just enough to remind me it's working hard.

It pains me to score these this low because they're the best headphones I've ever owned. The ear cups are huge, they sound better than anything I've put on my head, and the noise cancellation is unmatched — transparency mode makes it feel like nothing's there at all.

But that headband. The canopy between the two metal bars sags after enough use, and suddenly you've got bare metal pressing into your skull. I had to buy the rubber insert accessory just to make them wearable again. The weight doesn't bother me (big head, plenty of real estate), but the headband alone is the reason I haven't upgraded — they're pricey, and I know the canopy will collapse again in a year.

Hot take: I love the slim case. Tossing them in a backpack or suitcase without a giant clamshell is the move.

Picked this up at release in October 2021 and it's wild that, four and a half years later, it still feels brand new. I've got an M3 for work and the gap between them is barely there — a PC at this age would be wheezing. The M chips genuinely rewrote what's possible for Macs.

The 14-inch is the sweet spot for me when I'm on the go, and this thing still keeps up in the AI era. I've even run small models locally on it. The post-butterfly keyboards are great, but the trackpad is the real star — every time I touch a PC, that's the thing (besides the OS) I miss instantly.

My favorite device I own, full stop. If it had a terminal, I'd ditch the laptop most days. Small enough to go anywhere, big enough for movies on long flights and train rides, powerful enough for whatever I throw at it. With the Apple Pencil Pro, notes are effortless — I liked the first one so much I sold it back to Apple to upgrade to the cellular 256GB.

Hot take: I love that it has Touch ID. I'm flipping this thing between portrait and landscape constantly — movie one minute, book the next — and Face ID would be eating my palm half the time.

One gripe: no M chip. The A17 handles everything I need, but it blocks screen extension to a second monitor. That's the one workflow I keep wishing for.

These earned a spot in my bag the moment I realized my AirPods sound like I'm calling from inside a tin can the second a coffee shop gets busy — and brewery audio? Forget it. (Working from breweries is a real perk of my day job!) Clip on the Mic Mini and Zoom meetings suddenly sound like I'm in a booth.

Compact, battery that just keeps going, and they actually do the job. Bonus: priced reasonably, on sale constantly, and small enough that I throw them in a backpack without a second thought. Already hyped to start using them for video reviews on the side project.

Raycast is the first thing I install on a new Mac (technically second — Homebrew has to come first, since that's how I install Raycast). At its floor, it's a better, faster Spotlight. The ceiling is way higher: hotkeys, scripts, window management, each one shaving 1–5 seconds off my day. They stack. The more I use it, the more my muscle memory kicks in, and now I genuinely feel lost on a computer without it.

Want to try it yourself? Here's my affiliate link — my take would be the same with or without it.