[hc-taway]

A note for any macOS n00bs out there getting M1s: the first rule of having crazy-good battery life on a MacBook is to use Safari. Chrome and Firefox eat battery (and memory, and CPU cycles) like it's free. If you've not used Safari before, you may not realize how bad they are because you haven't seen an example of what "good" looks like. They're quite bad. The weak extension ecosystem kinda sucks, but you're stuck with it unless you like losing 2+ hours of battery life per day (believe it or not, it used to be worse) just for having FF or Chrome open in the background, instead of Safari. Perhaps one glorious day anyone whatsoever making any major software product will care as muh about power & resource use as Apple does. That day is not today.

Do this especially since you're probably not gonna be able to avoid using at least a couple resource-hog Electron apps, so you need to save your battery for them.

Also: Apple's first-party "apps" in general are pretty great. Preview is a religious experience. Terminal.app is one of the best GUI terminal emulators on any platform. Give them a shot if you're not used to bundled software being much good.

[finiteseries]

The Text/Shapes/Charts styling that make Keynote slides so consistently nice is also available with the same UI in Numbers (Excel) and Pages (Word).

With the ability to have multiple tables next to and around Keynote styled diagrams and notes on a single, giant zoomable sheet-canvas with all the usual spreadsheet functionality, Numbers quickly replaced my personal Excel usage.

[hc-taway]

Oh yeah, I love the "office suite". It reminds me of when I ran Linux and used some of the lighter, alternative office-type options (OpenOffice was so damn heavy and not all that pleasant to use) like Gnumeric, Abiword, et c., except... well, much better in almost every way. But I don't have to interop with MS Office very often so I'm not sure if they're much good at that. Certainly they beat the hell out of using resource-hog Google Docs tabs, though, plus they're way more pleasant (far less laggy, for one thing).

Notes is nice. I wish it had a 1st-party export solution. Markdown as an option for formatting would be good but it's not a deal-breaker. Being able to drag all kinds of crap, including entire PDFs(!) into Notes and have it Just Work is pretty great.

Preview is so, so good. Thanks to it, macOS is the only platform I've ever used where I don't hesitate even a second to open a PDF. Plus it's great at so many other things.