Uses

16GB. Fanless and light enough to carry everywhere, with a screen big enough that the desk setup is a preference, not a requirement.

32″ 4K IPS with a Thunderbolt hub. One cable to the laptop carries video, power and every peripheral. Still a single display, not two.

Wireless mouse and keyboard, paired to switch between devices. The scroll wheel is the part I would miss most.

The on-device test unit. A simulator will lie to you about haptics, camera, and real network conditions.

A mid-range Android on purpose. It is closer to what most users carry than a flagship, which is where React Native's cross-platform promise actually gets tested.

Dark mode. The AI-assisted editor I work in day to day.

Replaced ESLint and Prettier on new projects. The speed difference is not subtle.

The terminal. Fast, native, and where both Claude sessions live.

Open for the simulators and native build tooling, not for writing code in either.

The actual dev loop for the React Native work — prebuild, dev client, and OTA updates without a store release.

Work and personal, kept apart and symlinked on my desktop as “claude” and “claude-personal”, each running in its own Ghostty window.

Both accounts are reachable from my iPhone and Android, so a long-running task does not need me at the desk.

Permanently on, kept awake with Caffeine, for any task that has to keep running while I am away.

Device tunnels and access. It is how the phones reach the Mac Mini without exposing anything to the public internet.

Performance and Coverage panels. Almost everything I've written about performance started in one of the two.

Throttled mobile, Cape Town test location. Lab numbers from a fast desktop are a story, not data.

Field data settles arguments that lab data starts.

Replaced Flipper in the stack. Component tree, network, and the profiler in one place, without a separate app running.

Next.js, self-hosted fonts, deployed on Vercel. No client-side framework on article pages.

Where this site and most web projects deploy. Preview URLs per branch make review a link, not a checkout.

Postgres in both cases. Neon when I only need a database, Supabase when auth and storage come with it.

With visual regression. The subject of one of the more useful things I've written.

Cloud builds for both platforms from one config, then straight to store submission without touching Xcode or Android Studio's own release flow.

Where a build actually lands in front of a client before it reaches the store.