Apple MacBook M1

The other laptops overheat soon after purchasing, often with just the bare OS running. There is a 3 yo laptop that my parents still use, but it has to always be plugged in, and the fans will spin loudly even in suspension. My >10 yo macbooks also have bad batteries. One of them won't last one minute, and will also overheat with minor workloads. They were not immune to overheating when new, but unreasonable overhearing (for the time) definitely didn't become an issue at within 3 years of purchase. And that's with Intel macbooks. My M1 from Dec 2020 works like new (I'm sure the battery life has shortened, but not in a way that I notice). It overheated a couple times running LLMs—that's it. That's how I know the fans work.

Is this because they don't have macs or because they spent more on the other stuff? My M1 macBook is 4+ years old and still going strong. How many phones do average people buy in that same time?

Their products are too reliable. My M1 MacBook is still going great after 4 years. My iPad Pro from 2018 is showing its age, but still has another couple of years of life left.

Yep. I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1. I was more or less upgrading yearly in the past because the speed increases (both in the G4 and then Intel generations) were so significant. This M1 has exceeded my expectations in every category, it's faster quieter and cooler than any laptop i've ever owned. I've had this laptop since release in 2020 and I have nearly 0 complaints with it. I wouldn't upgrade except the increase in memory is great, I don't want to have to shut down apps to be able to load some huge LLMs, and, I ding'ed the top case a few months ago and now there's a shadow on the screen in that spot in some lighting conditions which is very annoying. I hope (and expect) the M4 to last just as long as my M1 did.

my requirements is "any macbook with apple silicon (M1/2/3/4/etc) with at least 16GB of RAM (and 256GB of ssd)". I'm still rocking an M1 16GB for my personal stuff since 2022. No complaints.

Yeah the only bit of software I’d think of as slow is Steam. Everything else is incredibly snappy. My iPhone is several years old now and it never misses a frame. My MacBook M1 is 3 years old and feels brand new still.

I can’t believe my M1 Mac is almost 3 years old, performs just like the day I bought it (blazingly fast). My work Thinkpad from the same period feels half way dead.

What does Apple gain from this scenario? Just to add, I also do my work from an M1 MacBook that I crammed Asahi onto. I got it used for a few hundred dollars last year and it's a perfectly fine experience (for me).

I would have blindly have voted for Lenovo. Until this year, when (out of technical curiosity) I got an M1 powered Macbook. I use MacOS, but I also need Linux all the time. So I installed Ubuntu on Parallels - and it is amazingly fast, capable and integrated with MacOS. So - my heart wants to have a pure Open Source powered computer. But in practice, this little machine with its infinite battery and mind blowing speed does it all.

Other than this situation, what other landmines are there? I have an M1 with Asahi Arch Linux that I've been using as my primary laptop for the last 8 months, its my favorite laptop by far out of the 5ish I have.

I'm in that class. My iPhone has more power than my MacBook it seems. But I do love the m1 still for what it can do.

I'm still on my early 2022 macbook 14" M1, which I was thoughtful enough to get 64gb ram for at the time, and remain still incredibly happy. M6 must be nuts!

> Well this is a software issue, > You don't know that for sure. > all of the Macs out there run the same operating system, Wrong. Lots of Mac users skipped the Liquid Glass OSes. I was one until I bought an M5 that came with it. In fact, I was two versions behind on my M1 because the one before Tahoe also offered nothing that I wanted. > the same software. This referring to third-party software (my interpretation) is also wrong. People have wildly different setups, at least among us nerds. > This can't an issue of a defective Mac. Again, you don't know that. But your comment later on about two models having said issue is concerning. That said, there's a high likelihood that you run the same software on each. > I am right now using my M5, on low power mode on a flat surface and it's almost too hot to type on. If that's the case, I begin to suspect that the physical sensitivity that you mentioned in a different comment is the source. If that's the case, I'm empathetic cause it'd really suck to have that reaction. I can only make my M1 hot enough to noticeably warm up (or get hot) when slamming the CPU / GPU. I would hate for it to feel that way to me during normal use and you have my genuine sympathy if that's your experience on a machine running at normal levels. And if that's it, then get an external kbd and mouse. Not an ideal solution, but it sounds like the best option. Not portable. I know. But I'm looking for solutions here and there may be some compromise needed.

Yeah... my solution for the last 3 decades (with a grain of salt) has been to buy the most expensive apple laptop every 6 years and never, ever update the OS. Rolling everything over to a new dev environment every 6 years is annoying but manageable. This way I took a Powerbook 3400 into the intel age, took a titanium macbook into the air age, took two airs for almost a decade from 10.4 to 10.10 or something, then an M1. Which I'm still using. The 3400 still boots into OS 9 or something. I feel like I'm forgetting one. But the point is this: Apple software usually suits the hardware it's released with, and taking their updates is always a bad idea. Just get comfy with homebrew and settle down for your 30s or 40s until you've broken all the keys and the fan stops working.

Things were painful in the Intel era but I’m on M1 Mac and I’d have a really hard time justifying a request for an upgrade. I absolutely detested my old Intel MacBook (touchbar era) and couldn’t wait to get rid of it. I run bloated slow electron apps and chrome all day, generally with profligate usage patterns, and things hardly ever slow down even with corporate antimalware. Sometimes I forget about having left Windows VMs running in the background. Anyway, why would my company spend $2500+ every two years to turn instant into instant?