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Laptops · Apple Mac

Apple Mac M1/M2

8owners with an opinion
67%of verdicts positive
3/1positive/negative since 2024
2 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and performance; criticized for software and value.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 2 years
Can you recommend a recent Windows laptop? I've used ThinkPads and Surface Books and Alienwares and Razers in the $2k-$3k range and none of them came close to the overall feel of the Mac. The biggest differentiators for me are performance/watt + battery life. The Mac can keep going for a whole day while the others, even the underpowered Thinkpad with a tiny matte screen and a U-series processor and an extended battery, would die after 2-4 hours. This has consistently been my experience with every Windows laptop I've ever owned in the last 20 years. Even my Intel Macbook had better battery life, and the M1/M2 blows that out of the water. As you said, in another universe. Even while plugged in, the power efficiency means a cool and quiet machine. In two years of using one for work (web dev), I've never heard the fan come on once. Meanwhile my Windows laptops sound like jet engines as soon as the IDE opens, and while building projects, I can't even hear myself think. It's super distracting. Other issues are screen quality (the ThinkPad matte screens were so, so bad, but I think they do have nicer Dolby Vision ones too), DPI issues (Windows took forever to properly scale the UI up, and once in a while I still run into legacy apps that need manual configuration), sound (the Macbook sounds like proper speakers, not tinny laptop ones), charging (the Surface Book couldn't maintain a charge while gaming, it would just gradually lose power even while plugged in), keyboards (the 17" Ali…
Doesn’t like it
While the similar does not happen for me anymore with my TB3 docks or displays-with-built-in-docks like Dell U3219, back in the Mac M1/M2 days (2023?), my work laptop would turn the display into a state where I'd have to power-cycle it by physically disconnecting the power and then back on. Never had that with Linux on Thinkpad X1 Carbons (or one T14s with Ryzen I had in between). Realtek network hardware (1Gbps and 2.5Gbps) was very unstable for a long time, though it seems to work well today too. Even today, my USB audio device connected through my TB3 dock (behringer UMC22) usually does not show up on my Mac. Sometimes it does, but I do not bother figuring out why that happens, and resort to built-in speakers and microphone instead of my nice desktop monitors and pencil microphone pointed at me :) My point being that similar stuff happens with Macs, just depends on your "luck" — I am sure there is other hardware that still fails with the latest Macs. Even compared to Windows (but with very limited anecdotal data), my Linux works much better with random hardware I pick up.
Likes it
FWIW, I've used VMWare Fusion on Mac OS for years (and their Workstation product on Linux/Windows since 1999). It has worked well for me so far. VirtualBox used to be not great on MacOS with multiple CPUs and lots of interrupts - I noticed problems when moving from a Mac laptop with a spinning HDD to NVMe SSDs. The slow inter-processor interrupts (IPIs) and some related contention caused concurrent IOs to get very slow with fast SSDs with VirtualBox (back when still running on an Intel Mac with VMWare kernel module). In fact, I could get more IOPS out of the VM with fio when giving just 1-2 vCPUs to the VM, vs 4-8 vCPUs. I haven't tested VirtuaBox on latest Mac versions as I'm happy with VMWare Fusion (also on ARM M1/M2 machines). The product is still good, regardless of Broadcom's business shenanigans. Edit: If Parallels works for you, but only the SSH terminal sessions get stuck, maybe the "shared network" connection drops your connections for some reason. Before diving too deep into troubleshooting this across layers, you could try out the usual suspects workaround, setting SSH TCP keepalive. I have this for some connections in my ~/.ssh/config file: TCPKeepalive yes ServerAliveInterval 30
Likes it
It's wild but my own issue free MacOS era was OS9 on my iBook G3 clamshell. Had to replace a harddrive (bounced down a stairwell, but held together) and upgraded the ram, but other than that fine experience. My next Mac was a 2008 Macbook Pro (non-unibody) that had backlight issues out of the box, failed display cable two years in, and then the GPU failed. (Nvidia plague era, and Steve Jobs silence plague era of shit-ass fan curves) To this day I still refuse to trust Apple's fan curves and install fan control software. Especially the M1 iMac with the cut down graphics that they only gave one fan and a smaller heatsink. Watched it break 100C regularly. The m1/m2 mac mini might be the only one I've never had issues with the stock fan curves so far, but I still bump them up anyway for peace of mind. I don't see a reason to let an SoC hit 98C even if its rated to do so.
Doesn’t like it
Obviously, it's not all about the power: I see a lot of comments here about heat, fans and comfort. And everyone is comparing against old Intel Macs, but if that's what you cared about, the benchmark must have been the Thinkpad X1 Carbon. And Macs still can't match that with their crappy keyboards, case strength and ergonomics (no sharp edges), spill-protection and non-glossy screens (remember, these are laptops to be used out and about — though I've only used M1/M2 Airs, M1 Max Pro 14 and M2 Pros 13/14, so maybe the newer ones are better). X1 Carbons have mostly moved to higher performing Intel chips, and thus lost those silent & cool characteristics, but other than the obvious (performance vs comfort), they are still my preferred choice in laptops.
Neutral
It's difficult to compare as things like whether your keyboard backlight were on the whole time start to have significant impacts in the runtime for more efficient machines and with certain things like hardware video decoding not being implemented watching high res videos compounds with the previous note while another use case may not. For me on my typical day I'd say something around 75% the time I get on macOS though. Can make it about 10 hours full to empty.
Neutral
I take screenshots all the time, and sync them to iCloud so I can access them immediately on my phone/iPad. I also back up previous years of screenshots, I think I have back to 2015 right now. But one thing that I've been keeping my eye on as well (and used for a month) is https://www.rewind.ai/ which records everything that happens on your M1/M2 mac screen and is immediately searchable. Just like Alex says here "They’re not as good as having the original, working thing – but they’re much better than nothing. I can dip in quickly and easily, and instantly be reminded of the creativity of my past self." And I think arguably Rewind solves for that completely (with the added cost of increased storage space and less specific capturing/resolution). This isn't a pitch for their product, it's just a natural progression to screenshots/capture that I believe is relevant here.
Doesn’t like it
> It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. Sure, but developing with Java up-to-16 is much slower with M1/M2 due to ports not being available, and Rosetta having to emulate. Datapoint: We develop plugins for Confluence and it’s about 1 minute to load each page. I don’t think developing Java 11 is a corner case of using a Mac.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
Target user is someone that wants to use Linux on good hardware. Apple hardware has some of the best perf-per-single-thread-perf-per-watt there is. Also, apple desktops are really compact and easy to keep out of the way while having really good performance too. My current linux PC cuda machine is the latest Intel Ultra 9 mini PC from minisforum, and it still isnt quite as fast as a years old M1/M2. The only thing it has that the mac doesnt is cuda egpu support.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
Most people don't realize that the Asahi team ship features only once they work without quirks. For the set of supported hardware features, Asahi is much closer to a macOS experience than to an average x86 Linux laptop experience. Meanwhile, Linux on my Lenovo X13s "works" but has tons of quirks: Boot fails 2 out of 3 times, the device hard-resets sometimes when waking up with a display connected, and the speakers are unusable due to lack of active overheat protection (and somehow this affects even external speakers). It technically works, but it's incredibly frustrating to use in practice. If you plan to use Linux and don't need an ARM laptop, there's little reason to prefer a Qualcomm device over an x86 one currently. On the other hand, M1/M2 easily outperform a broad class of x86 laptops, and they have a Linux experience that's for many use cases close to on par with official vendor support.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
The M1 is indeed too good. It seems like the best tool that Apple has to force users to upgrade is ending macOS support on it. I keep telling people that the best laptop value on the market right now is to buy a refurbished MacBook Pro M1/M2. I stand by that from a usability and performance standpoint, but I feel weird about recommending a laptop that could only get security updates for another 3 years.
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
> I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble. The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
> If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick hardware that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them. Some vendors sell hardware with Linux preinstalled or specifically tested (besides the obvious ones like System76/Framework/Tuxedo, Dell provides an XPS flavor that comes with Ubuntu). You don't need to actually use the preinstalled distro, but buying such models ensures baseline support is solid and it sends a signal to vendors to continue ensuring so. Then there's Apple's M1/M2 lineup, which provides the smoothest Linux experience you can have today (specific hardware features are not supported yet, the rest works extremely well!). Other than that, the Arch wiki is typically a good resource that lists quirks of individual devices with Linux.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
The half rate SSD at the entry point is unfortunate, but it takes the SSD performance from great to just fine. I wouldn't call it a deal breaker, especially at the price-point. If you can't splurge a little higher, you'll be ok. Really, getting the insanely good media encode engines built into the silicon is the point for a small indie creative shop (which is what we're talking about here). The rest of the M1/2 chip is just gravy for them.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
Local LLMs do best on big GPUs, which aren’t an option on Macs. What Apple has done with the M-series silicon is really impressive, but it’s not as fast as big, dedicated GPU silicon. > like if the most cost-effective work boot of 2025 is produced by Gucci. Apple M-silicon laptops are high quality, but they’re not the same as overpriced luxury goods. The price of entry level M1/M2 Macs is extremely reasonable, IMO.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
About mac storage — buy large high quality nvme, 40Gbps thunderbolt 3 enclosure for it, install your system there. Perfomance is very acceptable (~50% of the internal bandwidth, sorry no idea on latency) BUT you can simply take and boot it on any other M1/M2 mac if something happens.