The stuff Hacker News actually recommends.

Laptops · Apple MacBook

Apple MacBook 2019

8owners with an opinion
14%of verdicts positive
1/5positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance; criticized for reliability and noise.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like it
You would think, but My 2019 MacBook can barely run an older xcode that doesn't emulate newer phones / tablets. Some of these responses to my above post are a bit haughty. I'm just reporting from the trenches that the Apple tax is real, not everyone can afford to keep paying up, and a 20% cost increase is huge.
Doesn’t like it
Yes!!! Such great news. Apple has really gone to shit. I am confronted by Apple performance and bug pain every hour of my life. I always think: how can someone think this is acceptable? Steve Jobs wouldn’t. Everything is such trash I could go on for hours. I realized a long time ago that if the person at the top doesn’t care then no one will. It seems hard to believe but it makes sense when you consider individual incentives, politics, and the complexity of software. Everyone wants a safe promotion and doesn’t want to take the risk to push things forwards. Apple Silicon seems great but the Intel MacBook was the worst piece of shit ever so they kind of had to. I have a 2019 that was the top of the line but can’t do anything without overheating. It’s barely usable for any second laptop tasks.
Doesn’t like it
The leap from intel to the M series chips really left everyone else behind. I can't even use my 2019 Macbook anymore it feels so sluggish. I have an M3 Pro and it blows all my old computers out of the water. Can handle pretty insane dev workflows (massive Docker composed environments) without issue and the battery life feels unfair. I can put in an 8 hour workday without my charging cable, I don't think I have turned it fully off in a few months, it just chugs along. It really embodies the "it just works" mindset.
Doesn’t like it
I've used Darktable for quite a few years now, casually, because seriously I'm not paying 100+ euros a year as a casual to edit my photographs in lightroom. Darktable's flaw has _always_ been its UX as well as performance (at least on MacOS it was pretty laggy on maxed out Intel 2019 Macbook back in the day, but it runs like butter on Apple Silicone macs). They really should consider adding a beginner mode with the most common filters and hide everything else. The learning curve can be quite steep having to learn about things that are par for the course in Darktable such as Filmic RGB etc.
Neutral
It's not only a matter of bandwidth, but a matter of CPU utilization. I've tried to feed screenshots to ffmpeg and other tools, and it's just... unusable. It works, but consumes way too much resources. At least on my computer (MacBook 13-inch, 2019). So from on side you have CPU utilization, from the other - network. Network is cheap, but encoding is expensive. This is my thinking at least. I don't have proof - only local experiments, but it's a really good idea to start measuring this. I also have other ideas in mind on how to scan the screen and send only parts of the screen that have been updated. Probably if I send only a half of the screen, it will beat the video encoding in terms of network. The diff algo should be very fast though, since we're dealing (in case of 1280x720) with 1280x720=914400, 914400*4 = 3.49 MB info processing in 1 second. Also, curious to hear about video encoding efficiency vs 60x JPEG creation. Is it comparable?
Likes it
This whole thread needs a huge amount of salt and some empirical examples. I think if you compared side-by-side it’d be different. I remember my upgrade from 2019 MacBook to M1, when every single task felt about 50% faster. Or from swapping a window laptop’s HDD with an SSD. (Absolutely massive performance improvement!) Waiting forever for older windows computers to boot, update, index or search files, install software, launch programs, etc. Waiting ages for an older iMac to render an iMovie timeline. Others in the thread talking about the heyday of older spreadsheet and document programs that were just as fast. So? I bet you could write a book on the new features and more advanced tools that MS Excel offers today compared to 1995. We went from things taking minutes to taking seconds. So you could improve things by 50% and that could be VERY noticeable. (1min to 30s, for example.) If your app already launches in 500ms, 250ms is not going to make your laptop feel 2x faster even if it is. On top of that, since speed has been good enough for general computing for several years now, new laptops focus more on energy efficiency. I bet that new laptop has meaningfully better battery and thermal performance!
Doesn’t like it
Nope, they may just work for you tm, but not for all. As mentioned before, my work enforced 2019 macbook crashes minimum 3 times a week and my run of the mill windows PC hasn't "crashed" at all, like in the 3 years I've owned it, zero OS crashes. So I'm happy that you're content with your choice, but know yours is a decision paid with subjectivity wrapped very tightly. I'd love to see actual enterprises with large fleets of various real world used computers post metrics on failure rates, etc. I'd love to see it.