I held onto my M1 Air for almost 4 years and only upgraded because the LCD somehow developed some random screen-dooring issues. It was always completely capable for what I needed though I do appreciate the additional real estate afforded by its 15" M3 replacement.
Same. I can't imagine much heavier use than what I have done to this thing for the past 3+ years, and it still just literally does everything I ask of it. I've never even kept a laptop this long; up until now I would upgrade every two years since it's my primary money-making tool. But I have zero reason to upgrade currently.
I had one of those for work, recently got one of the newer MacBooks and the performance feels the same to me. Both were flawless.
What did change is almost everything else. Much better speakers, more ports, more external displays, no Touch Bar and probably some other stuff I forgot. Not worth buying a new laptop over though.
I had ordered an M3 Max 14 inches with 48GB, 1TB, with 16-Core CPU, 40-Core GPU. When I picked up the device last week, the sales person told me I had the right to return it within 14 days because the M4 models were to be released soon. I had paid almost 4600 EUR for that.
Today I happily ordered the M4 Max with 64 GB with otherwise same specs for 4600 EUR!!! Yay! Will return the other device happily.
Thanks @Apple for a huge increase in specs for not even 100 EUR more :)
PS: I just needed the RAM, as my M2/16GB constantly was using swap memory of up to 16GB and was really slow for my taste. I don't do "heavy weight lifting" with it, just leave all apps and tabs open :D
PPS: I use VS Code, Emacs, Firefox (eats my RAM super fast :), and a ton of other apps, and in Firefox I use lots of web based apps (Figma, Lucid chart, Canva and some more)
This is me. My wife's old intel air was finally getting slow enough she was willing to replace it. Ordered a 2023 M3 Pro for her on Monday (that was even on sale!) knowing the refund window was ~2 weeks. Today, ordered a 2024 M4 Pro for the same price and better specs. (M3Pro, 512GB, 18GB ram -> M4Pro, 512GB, 24GB ram).
I doubt I'll upgrade anytime soon, but at this rate when I do need to, I feel like I'm just going to get a Max because of how happy I've been with the base M1 Pro (just upgraded the RAM a step).
That is if I don't just suddenly decide to replace the batteries (relatively cheap from the apple authorized store compared to a full upgrade).
Yep, even though the 2.2x is a bug upgrade, I’m not actually sure that’s compelling enough? When the M1 Max won’t do usually I turn to a server with 4-10x the corecount…
The customer base on M1 is larger and more likely to be interested in upgrading. The M1 Air was only discontinued in March and is still for sale through Walmart and Costco. Not to mention the resale market created by all the people that moved to M2 and M3. There are tons of M1s out there. It is probably the most relevant comparison they could make, even though we're accustomed to seeing previous-gen benchmarks on everything.
Sadly these days it's a waste to upgrade a single generation. There's very few workloads that work poorly on gen x-1 and work well on gen x.
So while frustrating to people that want to geek out on the tiny details, the real market for Apple is people not using Apple silicon and maybe the M1 users. Upgrading from M2 or M3 isn't worth it. Thus the comparisons with Intel Macs and M1s.
I like the M1 comparisons. They got some free improvements from the x86 -> ARM transition but everything past that is on them, so it's interesting to see how far they've come.
But that aside I agree it feels like marketing slime to tout improvements over 3 gens ago. At least include comparisons to last gen. Preferably with numbers on the chart.
Around announcements like these I always look for good deals on the previous models. Anyone know any particularly good deals for M2 or M3 based macs now?
Interesting that GPU core counts and max memory remained static from M3 Max at 40 and 128 respectively, cost saving measure to account for the bump from 8 -> 16gb at the low end of the line?
Equipping the MBA with 16 gigs but maintaining M2 and M3 cpus, thats's an interesting take. I do pity folks who got those with 8 gigs. Their resale value just went down a lot.
Graphics performance, no. AI, also probably no. Especially if you're talking the higher end RTX cards that cost as much as these laptops. But they'll run editors, compilers, browsers, etc as well or better than a dedicated rig.
What’s the case for new MacBook Pros? The design hasn’t changed since the M1 as far as I know, and maybe even earlier with the x86 Retina display MacBook Pro. These minor specification changes don’t make real life use much better. When will Apple do a bigger redesign?
I hope they're also working on redesigning the MacBook Pro to feature a display without a notch. I'd buy that instantly.
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