Apple MacBook Pro M1

> it’s also quite convenient for Apple that all this stuff is effectively non-replaceable / upgradable On the other hand, I’m happily banging away on my ca. 2020 M1 MacBook Pro. It just got a warranty service, free to me, that replaced the screen. It will probably get replaced around 2030. That simply isn’t the norm with the alternatives. The hypothesis that this is self serving isn’t supported by the evidence. Instead it’s more parsimonious to conclude that this is Apple being Apple with pushing design to the limit when it comes to executing a vision. User-upgradable parts have not been part of that vision since Jobs returned.

My M1 Pro MBP is 6 years old and continues to be the best computer I own, so if that’s Apple not trying, god help everybody else once they do.

I find Microsoft user hostile. I find that Apple is interested in selling me a tool that mostly gets out of my way, provides me with some pretty cool features, mostly respects my privacy, and isn't shoehorning bullshit AI into everything. As a long-term Apple user, I feel respected. Beyond all of that, I like that I only have to buy a machine once a decade because their hardware lasts. I'm typing this on a 2020 M1 Macbook Pro that STILL feels modern, even six years later. I'll get AT LEAST another two or three years out of this machine if I don't do anything stupid like spill a drink on it (last computer died that way). If the alternatives are clunky linux machines or awful microsoft machines, I'll stick with my Mac, thanks.

I’ve been a Mac user for 20 years and it’s wild to think how slow my 2003 PowerBook G4 or even my 2008 MacBook Pro felt after five years compared with my 2021 M1 Pro. My 2013 Core i7 took almost eight years to get to where the previous ones were at five, and if it weren’t for local LLMs pushing me toward an upgrade in the next year or two, I have to imagine my M1 Pro could be my daily driver well into the next decade.

Noticing how the M6 has finally doubled the M1's single core performance, nearly six years later. The M1 mini was my first foray into mac computing. I used it as my daily driver until I got the M1 Macbook Pro a year later. Been using that ever since. I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last. I've had no interest in upgrading or buying something else, even though I want to just for pet projects but can't justify the extra cost.

It's not really a small percentage of users. All users will have trouble with the battery - eventually. My DS4s ran out of battery life in about three years of usage; I still have one of them that I use wired with my PC, but I absolutely cannot use it wireless. Likewise with my DS5s - one of them barely held a charge 2-3 years in. I'm sure with good battery management you can extend the lifespan to be closer to 5-6 years, like my M1 MBP from 2021 that still has a 9+h battery life (though down from 12 as I remember), but that only keeps them going for a little longer. It's just a fact of how Li-ion batteries work that they will lose their capacity eventually. E: DS4 = DualShock 4, DS5 = DualSense; these are the standard PlayStation controllers for the PS4 and the PS5 respectively.

> Oh, that smell of molten keyboard plastic, those yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust, those laser-machined loudspeaker holes next to keyboard, all filled with grime! How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line! Not to mention the power button right next to backspace. It's so rewarding when its charger dies in a month, and you feel superior to your colleague, whose vintage 6 months old charging cable with none of that extraneous rubber next to the connector catches fire along with your office. What a time to be alive! None of the above sound like anybody's actual experience. Which is also they have the biggest resale value retention among PC laptops, and biggest reported user satisfaction. Now, if you were about the lack of ports (at least for a period) or the crappy "butterfly" keyboard (for a period), you'd have an actual point. Home/End is just Control-A/E. Never seen "molten keyboard plastic". I'm sure you can find some person who has that somewhere on the internet. I doubt it's a problem beyond some 0.0001% rare battery failures or something like that. "yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust". Not sure what this even means. Especially AS Macs don't even get hot. I haven't heard the fan ever, and I use a M1 MBP of 5+ years with vms and heavy audio/video apps. "when its charger dies in a month" is just bs.

5-6 hours? In 2025? That's... really bad. My 5 year old Macbook Pro lowest-spec M1 gets at least 10-12 hours of work on a charge and lasts for weeks in sleep mode.

I've been using an M1 MBP with 8GB of RAM since 2020 for video editing, Blender, music production, and web development, and it's fine. It's not perfect, but it's totally serviceable and I rarely think about it, which tells me that 8GB is enough for the average computer user who's doing much less intense work.

I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup. I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or M6. However - before, MacOS was a big factor driving me towards Apple - now, it would be hard for me to give up my Linux setup and all the stuff I love about it, even for such performance...Linux progressed really nicely, while MacOS deteriorated at the same rate, and it's changing the balance and the decision for me.

I’m not sure this is the best advice anymore. So many people’s needs don’t demand much of a computer. My last personal computer purchase was an M1 Pro MBP 4 years ago. I could have maxed it out and my life would be the same, but instead I bought on the low end… or somewhere in the middle if we look at Apple’s lineup as a whole. It’s now 4 years later. This is the longest I’ve probably ever kept a laptop. It’s still running fine, I’m not hurting for more power, and will like wait another 1-3 years before an upgrade… maybe more, we’ll see. The laptop is a glorified Chromebook for me. I do edit some photos from time to time, encode some video, and code a bit. But 95% of the time, I’m just looking at webpages. Maxing the thing out would have been a massive waste of money. My work laptop is also a MBP of a similar generation. It’s not up to me when it’s upgraded, but it also wasn’t maxed out, and it’s still fine. VS Code and Outlook aren’t going to run fast enough to matter with a M5 Mac and 128GB or RAM. The bottleneck isn’t my laptop, it’s bureaucracy. For some, having top end specs will matter, but that is a shrinking percentage of the overall market.

0. Software engineer 1. 14” MacBook Pro - M1 Pro 2. My current laptop is about 4 years old. Historical, I’ve updated more frequently, but every time I think of doing it I don’t see a point. The M1 has held up amazingly well, a new one would give a minor speed update for some stuff. I don’t use my personal laptop a ton these days, and don’t push it very hard. My work laptop is the same chip, just a large screen. It’s off lease at this point, so I’m due for a new one, but I’m not feeling it as an issue where I’m reaching out about it. My past justification was that Macs held their value well, so I could sell my old one, get a new one, and always be pretty up to date, for a more modest price. With the M1 Pro, I think I may have skipped an entire upgrade cycle already, and will likely skip another one. It is also possible that it feels more like that because Apple is finally shipping regular updates again. For many years during the Intel period, the update cycle seemed random, which I did not like and it made the upgrades less predictable.

in my day job doing enterprise web apps at a mac shop 16G became unusable for the engineers 3-5 yeas ago. i managed to weasel into them getting me a 64G M1 Pro in 2022 (now they won't buy us any higher than 32G). i'll probably still be using this thing in six years! to be fair, given the choice between a decade-old macbook and basically any current windows box with same specs, i'd take the macbook every time. but, if i could put linux on it...

I've been on a Macbook M1 Pro since 2022 (bought refurbished on Amazon for cheap) and it's still such a powerhouse. It doesn't struggle at all with anything that I throw at it. Kind of amazing. Nothing has broken and I consistently get 4-6 hours of heavy work time while on battery. An amazing machine for the price I paid.

In 2021, we bought everyone M1 Pros with 32 gigs of ram. Historically, keeping a developer in a 4 year old laptop would have been crazy, but nobody is really calling for upgrades, like we did back when we got rid of the Intels.

I'm in the same boat. Still running an MBP M1 Pro 14". Luckily I bought with 32GB in 2021 when it came out so it can run all things docker similar to your setup. I recently ran a production like workload, real stress test, it was the first time I had the fan spinning constantly but it was still responsive and a pleasure to use (and sit next to!) for a few hours. I've been window shopping for a couple of months now, have test run Linux and really liking the experience there (played on older Intel hardware). I am completely de-appled software-wise, with the 1 exception of iMessages because of my kids using ipads. But that's really about it. So, I'm ready to jump. But so far, all my research hasn't lead to anything where I would be convinced not to regret in the end. A desktop Ryzen 7700 or 9600X would probably suffice, but it would mean I need to constantly switch machines and I'm not sure if I'm ready for that. All mobile non-macs have significant downsides and you can't even try before you buy anywhere typically. So you'd be relying on reviews. But everybody has a different tolerance for changes like track pad haptics, thermals, noise, screen quality etc. So, those reviews don't give enough confidence. I've had 13 Apple years so far. First 5 were pleasant, next 3 really sucked but since Apple silicon I feel I have totally forgotten all the suffering in the non-Apple world and with those noisy, slow Intel Macs. I think it has to boil down to serious reasons why the Apple hardw…