Entering My Writer Era at a Coffee Shop
Featuring my new expensive typewriter and embracing the ways I actually work
I bought a MacBook Neo.
i. the cafe
I'm writing this from a café that Claude helped me find (somewhere with WiFi open late on a Sunday night since the library is closed). It’s a bit after 8 PM, just a few minutes after the Apple Store on Boylston St closed. I frantically got there right before closing and decided to unbox it now instead of waiting until I got back home.
This place is full of people also on their laptops so I don’t feel out of place setting up what I’m affectionately calling my “expensive typewriter”. The cacio e Pepe bagel is… kind of mid, but they used a generous amount of cream cheese and the smoothie was nice.
Hearing a “STAYC Girls, it’s going down” from the most recent song has convinced me that whoever runs the playlist has stellar taste. It reminds me of when my friend Ginny took me to see them live in Boston (10/10 concert btw).
I decided to try and write for a while and see how long this Neo’s battery life really lasted (spoilers: it holds up really really well). Maybe now I can get back to writing instead of….well a lot has happened in the past month.
There’s an embarrassingly long gap between my last post in April and now. Part of the cost of “wanting to do all of the things I want to do without having to give any of them up” is having to delay that desire because of time. I’ve mentioned that I refuse to just have the LLM write for me, even though it has a copious amount of data on me, because literally what would be the point of that.
At the same time, it’s not like I really told anyone about this project? Blog? Extended version of my LinkedIn? Diary that exists publicly on the internet? The exact identity of this writing works is admittedly still to be decided and I thought I would give myself more time to figure it out. Then I said f*ck it we ball because that’s what I’ve found forces me to find that identity along the way.
Also, I work best when there’s a deadline lighting a fire under my butt to push myself hopefully not to the point of dropping this completely.
ii. the part where I justify buying a new laptop
Back to the MacBook Neo because she a cutie. I never thought I’d consider myself a writer, still don’t tbh, I’m sure plenty of what I post on here will have first-draft-energy and that’s kind of the point. If you want polished, look at my LinkedIn, I don’t have the bandwidth to do that x2
As for why I got a Neo specifically for this purpose, the idea was simple enough. I needed a writing machine that couldn’t tempt me into spinning up a model mid-sentence or switching over to side projects or literally anything else. I’ve entered the “multi-Clauder” phase of my relationship with Claude Code, which has been amazing for my coding life and abysmal for my writing. I can and always will give into those temptations and the bonus of a new laptop is that I’m too lazy to sign into Instagram, Twitter etc because I don’t feel like fighting with two factor authentication.
I’ve seen other peoples’ writing devices, but part of how I function is that I have many many ideas all at once and like to contain them to multiple windows, which works best on MacOS. To further reassure myself that I wasn’t just fully tempted by having a cute pink light laptop (which played a huge factor), I made a table for myself breaking down what I’ve tried writing with.
iii. reality
So here we are in the coffee shop. As someone who’s always worked remote post-pandemic, I feel like there’s a tendency to romanticize working from one of these places. It might be hilarious to people who actually are regulars somewhere with the way I view it as fantasy to actually be a regular at one of these places, typing away on my laptop and taking in the vibe of the space with a sense of focus and purpose.
Here’s what it actually looks like: I’ve been eating my bagel with only my left hand in in chunks so I don’t get my brand-new keyboard messy, with mixed results. I have at least four parallel threads open in my head right now and stressing over why I didn’t bring a notebook (I forgot it at home). I have been switching between this piece, a graduation post I’ve been procrastinating on, ideas for what else to load my Substack with, and a to-do list of things I want to feed to Claude Code when I get home because I couldn’t connect to the WiFi here. At the same time, I see the writing happening and something clicks about why people come to places like this.
In both cases of the Neo and the coffee shop, constraint is a feature. Whether it’s being surrounded with tempting rabbit holes and software or the many many distractions of my home, stripping it away does add layers of clarity.
That’s the other part I’ve learned to embrace about myself. Any distraction is lethal to me, but…why fight it in the first place? Instead of trying to force better discipline into myself, why not design more ideal conditions?
Now, I’m not saying that the MacBook Neo is magically going to make me into a consistent writer, but getting clarity about what works and doesn’t work about my previous attempts gives me some hope for this next chapter.
I started sneezing multiple times at the shop and took it as a sign that I was getting chilly and took an Uber home (I’m not about to get on the Green Line with a $500 new computer, I’m not insane).
Then, I went to one of the common room spaces in my apartment and wrote the LinkedIn post about my graduation all the way until 11:30 PM. I didn’t finish this current train of thought until two days later.
The Neo’s battery still held out strong.
to sum it up, some things I’ve learned about how I work:
☐ Deadlines are not the enemy. They’re the only reason anything gets done.
☐ Any distraction is lethal. The solution is better conditions.
☐ Constraint is a feature, not a punishment.
☐ I have multiple brain streams running at once. Fighting that wastes energy.
☐ I will always find my identity for a project by doing it, not by planning it first.
☐ F*ck it we ball is a legitimate creative strategy.
iv. Macbook Neo Review
The Neo is great for writing. It is not great for the seventeen other things I might do instead of writing, but that’s not what I need it for right now. The keyboard is nice to use, the weight is incredibly light, even better than an M1 Mac Air. The performance is better than my very low expectations for Liquid Glass. Apple has really done it again
I have a few trips that I expect to take it on instead of my usual big boi M3 and I’m excited to see how it holds up. Today’s results have been promising.
#notsponsoredbyApple