Anyone else traveling with two MacBooks? Looking for a way out of this
I travel a lot — international and domestic — and I'm always carrying both my work MacBook and my personal one. Every flight I'm thinking about the same things: what if the bag gets lost or stolen and both go at once, what if something spills, what if one gets stepped on in an overhead bin. Two laptops in one bag is two single points of failure stacked on top of each other.
The thing I keep going back to is: why am I doing this at all? Has anyone actually consolidated everything onto one machine?
What I'd want to do is run my work setup and my personal stuff (writing, some side coding, the usual) on the same laptop without it being a mess. But I don't know what the cleanest approach actually is in practice:
- Separate macOS user profiles for work vs personal? Does that actually keep things clean or is it annoying to switch?
- Some kind of partitioned disk setup or separate volumes?
- Just one user, but lean on different browser profiles and keep work apps in a separate Space?
- A VM for one of them? (Feels like overkill but maybe?)
- Or do most people just say screw it, use the personal one for everything, and accept the risk?
Genuinely curious how the people who do this every week handle it. What's the actual workflow that works long-term, not just in theory?