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Laptops · Apple MacBook

Apple MacBook M2

44owners with an opinion
75%of verdicts positive
26/9positive/negative since 2024
3 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability; criticized for software.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 3 yearsStill going
I have personal anecdotal evidence that they're getting more efficient: I've had the same 64GB M2 laptop for three years now. Back in March 2023 it could just about run LLaMA 1, a rubbish model. Today I'm running Mistral Small 3 on the same hardware and it's giving me a March-2023-GPT-4-era experience and using just 12GB of RAM. People who I trust in this space have consistently and credibly talked about these constant efficiency gains. I don't think this is a case of selling compute for less than it costs to run.
Doesn’t like itOwned 1 year
I've been using an M2 Macbook and M1 Mini for a while now and I can't confirm those statements about polish. The dock's icon scaling animation under the mouse cursor freezes in place at least once every few days. To this day the Stage Manager has a bug where pulling a minimized window to the front can throw it across the screen, with most of the window landing outside the visible screen area. For a few months I could reliably freeze the screenshot app by clicking 2-3 of the UI's buttons in an order that occurred during normal use. If I open more than ~10-15 images at once in the preinstalled preview app it often opens two or three windows instead of one and randomly distributes the pictures across those. More than ~50 image files can cause an error message and partial failure to open the files. In the first month after getting my Macbook, the "Open Anyway" button in the settings always crashed the settings app the first time after trying to start a new program. Turning off the second connected screen left windows on that screen inaccessible and I couldn't disable/remove the screen in the settings, and I could still move the cursor to the second screen while it was turned off. Clicking an 8GB video file in the file selection dialog spawned a ThumbnailExtension process that allocated 25GB memory within seconds and if not killed the process kept running for a minute after the file chooser was already closed...on a system with 8GB RAM, so it swapped 20GB. The file saving dialog i…
Likes it
I use Asahi Linux as my M2 work laptop on a daily basis. Other than the lack of USB external display support, which I don't use, and sleep eating up about 1% of battery per hour it works incredibly well. I have an 13th gen Intel laptop that I got last year and Asahi just runs circles around it on Linux with just about everything.
Likes it
There isn't much to upgrade to if all you want is a desktop for gaming, a non-workstation work box or just a decent laptop. Much like smartphones, there just hasn't been much innovation of late. A midrange gaming desktop from mid 2023, something like rtx 4070 and ryzen 7800x3d, can still play pretty much any video game on max settings and high framerate at 1440p, and has sufficient performance for most workstation-esque tasks as long as you have enough ram. Similarly, the only thing my spare macbook m2 lacks compared to m5 is hardware av1 decoding - the performance is worse, but I don't really notice it in normal usage, and macOS 27 runs perfectly well on it. Local AI will crush any machine, of course, and if you need a 512gb ram box you'll probably need to sell both kidneys, but you're well past the average consumer territory with those. So, fingers crossed nothing breaks down and that some of the funny money goes into R&D which will eventually trickle down to consumer devices in a few years (16TB gum stick SSDs at sane prices pretty please) instead of endless datacenter GPUs and SSDs that will be tossed into a shredder in x years.
Doesn’t like it
ThinkPad X1 from 2 years ago was very solid and under Fedora everything but camera worked out of the box. And for camera issue I had to blame myself for not checking details of a specific model as Lenovo was offering at that time fully-Linux compatible model. It took about one and halve year before Linux fully supported it. And I already upgraded SSD on it which took less than 10 minutes. The only complain is bad battery life. With several VMs running mostly idle it doesn’t lasts even two hours. But then I used beefy MacBook M2 at my previous work and with VMs it lasted only 4 hours.
Likes it
I had a ton of issues with my Macbook pro M1 16GB, memory pressure would be in the yellow always and into red frequently which caused sound stutter and all sorts of issues. My M1 air (I think 8GB?) had similar issues My M2 24gb was amazing - especially since it allowed dual monitors. I recently upgraded to the M4 32GB and it is my "do everything" computer and is absolutely awesome. My personal experience with the m-series is that get as memory as possible. I do feel the M1 had issues based on the couple I owned. EDIT: Even on 32GB my memory pressure is constantly in the yellow, but have not seen it go to red
Likes it
This is a very impressive release. At 17h to 20hr battery life on Linux, I'll finally be a able to solve my MacBook addiction. With my M2 MacBook running Asahi Linux or my work M3 MacBook running MacOS I easily get 10+hrs on battery. I've made several "attempts" to jump ship from Apple hardware before, like the dell XPS "developer edition" which ships with Linux so all the hardware was supported out of the box; the hardware was OK, but the battery life was abysmal. If I can't get 8hr of battery on a machine battery it's just a portable desktop.
Likes it
Agreed that lack of m4+ support is unfortunate but it'll get there. However, m2 MacBook still outperforms any other kit I have (dell developer edition shipping with Linux etc.) Also external displays work today as long as you use a USBC display port cable, the other USBC video standards are supposedly in the works but display port dongles aren't exactly hard to find.
Doesn’t like it
My M2 has an IDE and a couple active Firefox tabs open and I'm sitting at 30GB RAM usage, with about 5GB more on swap. It's a 32GB machine and I'm constantly opening Activity Monitor to kill Firefox tabs whose memory usage just seems to grow unbounded over time. Software shouldn't be written this way. I shouldn't have to disable mds-store because it likes to take up 2-3 cores at full throttle when I'm on 10% remaining battery. But it is, and 32GB isn't enough for me to even have a basic computing experience anymore, it seems.
Likes it
Imho 8GB RAM for productivity can quickly be restrictive. I used an M1 with 8GB and my current Macbook is M2 with 16GB, and to me the difference feels bigger than 2x. It seems not everyone here feels that way, but I'd say there's a reason Apple bumped the base models to 16 and makes that exclusive to non-Neo models.
Recommends it
TBH my asahi M2 experience has been the best supported linux laptop I have ever had. It's not and day compared to the XPS 13 I had before which was supposedly a well supported laptop for linux, you could even buy it with ubuntu. The only real drawback is no thunderbolt, and till recently no DP, and no x86 support. But I don't use any x86 only apps enough for it to matter. No thunderbolt sucks though.
Likes it
I love SQLite and this is in no way I'm making a point devaluing SQLite, Author's method is excellent approach to get analytical speed out of SQLite. But I am loving DuckDB for similar analytical workloads as it is built for such tasks. DuckDB also reads from single file, like SQLite and DuckDB process large data sets at extreme speeds. I work on my macbook m2 and I have been dealing with about 20 million records and it works fast, very fast. Loading data into DuckDB is super easy, I was surprised : SELECT avg(sale_price), count(DISTINCT customer_id) FROM '/my-data-lake/sales/2024/*.json'; and you can also load into a JSON type column and can use postgres type syntax col->>'$.key'
Likes it
On my ryzen laptop, i have to manually ensure that Linux is setting the right power settings. Once i do that, my 5950HS laptop from 2022 is completely competitive with my work MacBook M2. Louder and hotter at full tilt, but it also has a better GPU (even with the onboard Nvidia turned off) and i can get ~6 hours of web dev out of it if I'm not constantly churning tons of files. I would try it with Windows for a better comparison, or get into the weeds of getting Linux to handle the ryzen platform power settings better. With Ubuntu properly managing fans and temps and clocks, I'll take it over the Mac 10/10 times.
Neutral
>On my M2 MacBook, the renderer process is now using 6% CPU (down from 15%), and the GPU process is now using 6% CPU and less than 1% GPU (down from 25% and 20%). I honestly can't imagine typing this out and patting myself on the back rather than thinking "wtf am I doing? It's 2025, I have a high end laptop, and this is a note taking app. The total resource utilization should be close to zero." Modern devs are fucking hogs.
Doesn’t like it
Original author here! Thanks for (re)sharing. We previously discussed this at length in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 . I think this article has "aged well" in the sense that... nothing has changed for the better :( Since I wrote it, I did upgrade my machine: I now have a 24-core 13th Gen i7 laptop with a fast NVMe drive and... well, Windows 11 is _still_ visibly laggy throughout. Comparing it to KDE on the same machine is like night and day in terms of general desktop snappiness (and yes, KDE has its own bloat too, but it seems to have evolved in a more "manageable" manner). I've also gotten an M2 laptop for work since then, and same issue there: I remember how transformative the M1 felt at launch with everything being extremely quick in macOS, but the signs of bloat are _already_ showing up. Upgrading anything takes ages because every app is a monster that weighs hundreds of MBs, and reopening apps after a reboot is painfully slow. Still, though, macOS feels generally better than Windows on modern hardware. About the article itself, I'll say that there was a complaint back then (and I see it now here too) about my blaming of .NET rewrites being misplaced. Yes, I'll concede that; I was too quick to write that, and likely wrong. But don't let that distract yourself from the rest of the article. Modern Notepad is inexplicably slower than older Notepad, and for what reason? (I honestly don't know and haven't researched it.) And finally, I'll leave you with this…
Doesn’t like it
When I bought my first Mac (M2) I could reliably freeze the screenshot app by clicking 2-3 buttons in the right order. It was fixed months later at least. To this day the mouse hover zoom animation for the dock freezes regularly and it happens on two separate devices. "Coincidentally" this animation was disabled by default. The preinstalled image viewer cannot open more than about 50 images without randomly distributing them across multiple windows and/or spamming a series of error messages telling me that some of the files cannot be accessed. When I click on certain video files in the file open dialog, some thumbnail process allocates over 25GB memory within seconds and the system becomes near unusable for a minute or two. I would say it’s roughly comparable to Windows 10/11, which fell off a cliff in terms of quality. But to be fair Mac OS can handle much longer uptimes, today my Macbook force rebooted after about 250 days and it ran perfectly fine up to that point.
Doesn’t like it
I bought a secondhand Macbook M2 and I was genuinely shocked at how awful Finder is (no offense to this guy) it sort of reminds me of the Android file manager that hides directories and files and tells you that "you can't do that, you cant just use a folder!" That was really off putting. I ended up installing Asahi despite getting the Mac to have access to the awful apps that I can't get on Linux like MS Word and photoshop. I hate this landscape tbh.
Doesn’t like it
I have an M3 for my personal laptop and an M2 for my work laptop. I get ~8 hours if I'm lucky on my work laptop, but I have attributed most of that battery loss to all the "protection" software they put on my work laptop that is always showing up under the "Apps Using Significant Power" category in the battery dropdown. I can have my laptop with nothing on screen, and the battery still points to TrendMicro and others as the cause of heavy battery drain while my laptop seemingly idles. I recently upgraded my personal laptop to the M3 MacBook pro and the difference is astonishing. I almost never use it plugged in because I genuinely get close to that 20 hour reported battery life. Last weekend I played a AAA Video Game through Xbox Cloud Gaming (awesome for mac gamers btw) and with essentially max graphics (rendered elsewhere and streamed to me of course), I got sucked into a game for like 5 hours and lost only 8% of my battery during that time, while playing a top tier video game! It really blew my mind. I also use GoLand IDE on there and have managed to get a full day of development done using only about 25-30% battery. So yeah, whatever Apple is doing, they are doing it right. Performance without all the spyware that your work gives you makes a huge difference too.