I was less patient than you. I went 2015 MBP => 2018 MBP (still with the old keyboard) => 2021 M1 MBP. I am so happy with this new machine. Not only does it have that SD card slot, but it is just so fast and responsive. My old one was no slouch - Intel i9, 32 GB ram, 2 TB SSD. But this is faster in every little way, and it's faster in many big ways, and it's dead silent no matter what.
For work purposes, I wanted Excel to be faster - well, that and to never have to be waiting for my mail program or anything else to be processing. For home purposes, I wanted Lightroom and photo management to be faster. It's doing a great job at both.
If the new "Mac Studio" machine had come out at the same time, I almost certainly would have bought that instead, and used the 2018 MBP whenever I needed portability. I used to work from a coffeeshop or the library 1-2 days a week, but I haven't done that for the past two years, strangely enough. A desktop would've been fine. But this is a nice machine.
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I was less patient than you. I went 2015 MBP => 2018 MBP (still with the old keyboard) => 2021 M1 MBP. I am so happy with this new machine. Not only does it have that SD card slot, but it is just so fast and responsive. My old one was no slouch - Intel i9, 32 GB ram, 2 TB SSD. But this is faster in every little way, and it's faster in many big ways, and it's dead silent no matter what.
For work purposes, I wanted Excel to be faster - well, that and to never have to be waiting for my mail program or anything else to be processing. For home purposes, I wanted Lightroom and photo management to be faster. It's doing a great job at both.
If the new "Mac Studio" machine had come out at the same time, I almost certainly would have bought that instead, and used the 2018 MBP whenever I needed portability. I used to work from a coffeeshop or the library 1-2 days a week, but I haven't done that for the past two years, strangely enough. A desktop would've been fine. But this is a nice machine.