I’ve been a Mac user for 20 years and it’s wild to think how slow my 2003 PowerBook G4 or even my 2008 MacBook Pro felt after five years compared with my 2021 M1 Pro.
replyMy 2013 Core i7 took almost eight years to get to where the previous ones were at five, and if it weren’t for local LLMs pushing me toward an upgrade in the next year or two, I have to imagine my M1 Pro could be my daily driver well into the next decade.
M1 Air guy here... I'm not looking for a replacement still. Almost 6 years now. Runs butter-smooth. Best tech purchase I ever made.
replyHave an M1 air as well. Got a Pro m5. For daily coding tasks, and general web browsing the M1 air still holds. I'm going to pass it on to my kid. Reminds me of the honda we have that we'll also pass down.
replyStill running my M1 Pro as well, no plans on upgrading for the next few years
replyThe M series MBAirs, and ofc the M1 originally, are hands down THE BEST laptops ever made. I have a maxed out MBP ofc but the Airs are unbeatable quality and price/performance.
replyI think the M1+ MacBook Airs will be regarded eventually like the original Macintosh originally the iPod, or the introduction of the original Air and the creation of the product class that came to be known as “ultrabooks”. It really changed everything about laptops to have a fantastic keyboard, speakers, screen, trackpad, hinge, and 12+ hour battery life… for $1k.
My 16" M1 Pro personal laptop is literally just as smooth for 99% of tasks as my work M5 pro. It's crazy how well they built these. I mean the screen on this and the speakers are superb. And you can find these for like 500-800 bucks 2nd hand. I just hope they give us a few more years of MacOS updates.
replyMy work gave me an m4 MacBook Pro. I could barely tell the difference between my personal computer and my work computer.
replygenerally agree, although mine's battery health has been sitting at 80% for what seems like ages now.
replySame, and I dual-boot Asahi as well.
replyBiggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.
replyI've held back an OS update or two, specifically because I'm worried about performance dropoff on the old chip
replyBut with all of the AI-discovered exploits I think it'll become more important to keep everything up to date
Apple makes security updates available for the last few major OS versions, and even backports really bad ones further back on a case by case basis.
reply