Found My Mac

 After trying out various new MacBooks I came to the conclusion that although I really like having a new MacBook, I really don't like the prices of new MacBooks.  I don't travel with a computer nearly as much as I had in the past so it's hard to justify spending the kind of money that new MacBooks cost.  I decided that I wanted to get a new Mac but at a lower cost.  I ended up deciding to try a Mac Mini.  I used a tool called refurb tracker to watch for refurbished Mac Minis with the specs I was looking for.  The refurbished models were few and far between for a while but I finally saw one that I could live with.  It is a 3.2 Ghz I7 model.  It only has a 512Gb SSD drive but that should be plenty for my Boot drive.  I can keep things like photos and music on an external drive.  I got the model with only 8Gb of RAM since Apple is ridiculous with their RAM prices.  To upgrade to 32GB they wanted $600.   I was able to get 32Gb of Crucial RAM on Amazon for $140 and I installed it myself.  The install process is not as simple as it used to be but using a tool kind that I bought last year and the iFixit video/guide I was able to upgrade the RAM myself in about half an hour.  Now I have the Mac Mini driving all three of my older Dell monitors and have not had any performance issues so far.  I am pretty happy with the performance and price since I paid less than have of the cost of the 6 Core MacBook that I had tried recently.

Exercise - Starting Again

 So earlier this year I decided to start to exercise more and for some time I did a pretty good job.  From mid February through most of June I was doing a great job. I started at 10k steps a day and after a month worked up to 12k steps a day. I was hitting my goal every day and was watching what I ate.  Just before New Years I was up to 203 lbs.  In June I was down to 187 lbs before my schedule got all messed up due to a number of issues.  Since then I have not exercised as much and have not done a very good job of watching what I ate and I was back up to 193.  Today I started exercising again.  I am once again starting at 10k steps a day and will do that for a month before moving the goal up.  I have a goal of hitting 185 or maybe 180 before the end of the year.

Search for new Mac

 I have been looking at updating from my 2015 MacBook Pro for months and have been kind of picky in what I have been willing to settle for.  I have tried multiple 16 and 13 inch MacBook Pros and always came up with some reason that I didn't want to keep it.  Once Apple announced that they were going to transition to ARM processors I decided that I would wait for one of those but I think I have changed my mind on that.  I don't want to be one of the people that buy the first ARM based Macs.  I have decided to go ahead and replace my 2015 now and then in 3-4 years the ARM based systems should be mature with the bugs worked out and then I can adopt the new platform.