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Laptops · Apple MacBook

Apple MacBook Intel MacBook

11owners with an opinion
45%of verdicts positive
5/6positive/negative since 2024
6 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and performance; criticized for portability.

What owners wrote

Likes it
From elsewhere in the thread, some hard numbers on the topic. https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/homebrew-os-arch-ci/30d/ Intel homebrew is larger than Linuxbrew, yet I think it'd be shocking if they dropped support for Linuxbrew. Old machines still work. They're still deeply useful. I'm still using daily an Intel Macbook with homebrew on it. When I no longer use it daily in some years more, it'll still make a perfect server.
Likes it
That's quite surprising to me as an 8GB Intel MacBook owner who currently has Discord, Firefox, VS Code, Outlook, Photoshop, Illustrator, Unity, and Blender open. Only very rarely (once a month?) does macOS smack me on the hand for getting too greedy, and the rest of the time it pulls some virtual memory witchcraft to keep things chugging along smoothly.
Doesn’t like it
You can get some decent size external usb SSDs. I have the Samsung T5 2TB. I think they have larger models now. Works pretty well. And with USB-C speeds are very usable. You can probably get faster/bigger stuff via thunderbolt. I'm considering getting one and a nice big monitor or TV. It needs to run x-plane 12 at decent speeds and maybe support a bit of light gaming. My macbook M1 pro is actually pretty decent for this but the screen is too small for me to easily read the instruments. I expect this will do better even in the base setup. Otherwise my needs are pretty modest. I'd love to see steam add some emulation support for these things as I have some older games that I enjoy playing. I currently play those on a crappy old intel laptop running linux. I've also been eyeing a new AMD mini PC with the latest amd stuff (Beelink's SER9). Seems pretty nice as well and seems like it is more performance for the money. Apple is doing its usual thing of charging you hundreds of euros for 50 euro upgrades. Get the base mac studio instead. It probably makes more sense if you are going down that path.
Doesn’t like it
Never updating within several days of anything important works well in my experience. Although the specific hardware matters as well—an Intel Macbook’s Facetime HD abomination with its out-of-tree drivers was a source of constant frustration; by contrast, the Framework’s camera (the old one, not the one released recently) has been solid enough that I don’t actually know what it is.
Doesn’t like it
I second this. We switched everyone at Instacart over from Docker Desktop to OrbStack because it was so much faster, easier on the battery, and simple to use. It was particularly noticeable on our older Intel MacBooks. Simply running Docker Desktop at all left mine noticeably hot and fans would regularly spin up for simple containers. The difference is much less stark on Apple Silicon, but last time I checked OrbStack was still dramatically faster across multiple metrics. Our local dev process was pretty heavy though. If you're doing simple, small containers and not copying a ton of things in, then you probably won't notice a difference. It's nice that the GUI app is not bloated and slow though.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
This space is problematic enough that you could reliably segfault 2017-2019 Intel MacBooks by closing the lid before unplugging HID peripherals, preventing suspend (and cooking it in your bag on the commute home). It also plagues Windows on custom PC builds, even when there are vendor drivers. Not every component plays nicely with suspend states, ASPM, C-sates, load line calibration, etc. And while often the capability exists natively to address issues (in BIOS, Linux, etc), how many people know how to start looking?