It's kind of embarrassing to admit this, but I was genuinely shaken by Apple raising prices on basically all of their products a couple days ago. I saw the warning Tim Cook gave a week ago. I had a M5 Pro MacBook Pro sitting in my cart on the apple website. I told my friends and family I was going to try and upgrade before Apple jacked their prices. I knew it was coming. But I hesitated a little too long and the $3,000 machine I was looking at getting is now $3,799. Felt awful :(

Now I don't strictly need a new Mac. My base spec 2021 M1 Pro MacBook Pro is still runs great and I still love it. However, the M1 Pro chip has a pretty critical flaw for me in that it can't support more than two external displays and I really want to upgrade my setup to (at least) three.

The problem I face now is that if I cough up the extra to get the machine $800 for the machine I was thinking of getting, I'd always have negative feelings looking at it knowing I could have had it for so much cheaper. However, if I spec down to a machine that costs the original $3,000 I was planning on I'd also have negative feelings towards it knowing I could have had better specs if I had just pulled the trigger a bit sooner. But I also keep ruminating on how I should have just bought the laptop originally even without buying anything.

So for a day or two I was feeling pretty resigned to feel bad for a while and eventually get over it. Until, I found a solution that actually has me feeling pretty good. While the M5 Pro chip was the first M-series Pro level chip to support more than two external displays, the Max level chips have always supported 4 external displays all the way back to the M1 Max.

So, I ended up getting a refurbished M2 Max MacBook Pro instead for around $1,600. It's basically two of my base spec M1 Pro strapped together (twice as much RAM, twice as much storage, twice as many external displays supported, roughly twice as fast chip) and it cost me less than what the M1 Pro cost me when I got it.

Assuming the one I bought comes in good condition, I think I'll have lasting positive feelings about it. Sure the M5 Pro I was looking at would have had a faster chip for most things and more RAM, but I wasn't really bottlenecked on either of those metrics. And I'm spending half as much as I was going to which feels pretty good :)

My guess is that Apple's price increases will eventually ripple through the secondary market and cause price raises everywehere else, so I feel like I made a smart decision and got a good deal. I'm pretty confident prices are not going to come back down anytime soon so my decision has helped me feel like I'm minimizing my regrets at least.