From Air to Pro

This past week, I made an unexpected purchase of a new Macbook computer for my day job. It’s not a case of my original one suddenly broke down and I needed to scramble to actually continue doing my daily work or anything like that. It was simply my time to participate in a company policy that allows for upgrading the tools we use to do our jobs, including financial help to purchase those tools.

For the entirety of my employment, I’ve always been running a Macbook Air of some release. They have always proved to be worth the money and get the jobs done, mostly.

This time around, I decided to go with a Macbook Pro, instead of an Air. I felt like I always fight with the hard cap of 8gb of RAM, and processing is probably not as optimal as it could or should be. It just seemed like I regularly push the Airs to their proverbial limits. This is why I went Pro this time around.

The stipend from the hardware policy, and the success in getting approved for Apple’s financing plan allowed me to happily include some upgrades from the base model. So I’ll be rocking the best offered processor, 32gb of RAM, and basically rocking a very top of the line computer.

How awesome for you, Michael

Which leads me to the actual point of this post. I’m not actually here to brag about getting a brand new, top of the line, toy.

It’s actually to remind myself, and anyone else who’s reading, that this type of machine is an extreme privilege and in no way a reason to rest on our laurels regarding performance and accessibility with created websites. Most people are not able to afford a $2,000+ laptop even in the best of times, let alone in 2021 following a year of uncertainty in 2020.

I need to make sure that websites load as fast as they possibly can, even if it already feels like they are from my machine. I need to make sure that files and assets are as small as possible so that the bare minimum baseline of a working website is still able to be accessed. I need to ensure people of all disability levels, and there are more than you realize, are still able to work with any and every site I touch.

I shouldn’t, and debatably can’t call things done because of the tools I access with, but I can use those tools to help everyone else. Hopefully, so do you.