Apple MacBook Pro M2 Max

I rarely feel that any more, especially with the latest liquid glass updates. I used to work on high profile native apps, but embraced Elektron after Figma destroyed Sketch, the supposedly superior native alternative. Electron apps run fine on my 4 years old M2Max 32gb Macbook Pro, I never really experience any problems running Notion, Figma, VScode and Linear side by side. I enjoy being able to resize text in all of these apps like you do on any website, or being able to select text across different UI elements and blocks. Web content has a built in level of accessibility that is really hard for native apps to implement.

> I type this from an M3 Max 2023 MBP that still has 98% battery health. That's amazing. I have an early 2023 M2 Max MBP that mostly charges in desktop mode, which limits to 80%. I just looked in battery health and it says 82%. Damn! :( For giggles, earlier today I asked Apple how much they'd give me for this machine if I traded it in on a brand new $5K M5 Max equivalent. $825. Ouch. I think I will keep it for a few more years. 96GB is enough memory to do anything I want, and it's been such a great performer that it's easily my favorite MacBook ever. I do wish the battery weren't so degraded though. For anec-science, here goes: % pmset -g rawbatt 03/03/2026 18:29:51 AC; Not Charging; 76%; Cap=76: FCC=100; Design=6075; Time=1092:15; 0mA; Cycles=63/1000; Location=0; Polled boot=02/09/2026 07:24:50; Full=03/03/2026 18:24:52; User visible=03/03/2026 18:28:52 % system_profiler SPPowerDataType | grep -A3 'Health' Health Information: Cycle Count: 63 Condition: Normal Maximum Capacity: 82%

My 2023 Macbook Pro (M2 Max) is coming up to 3 years old and I can run models locally that are arguably "better" than what was considered SOTA about 1.5 years ago. This is of course not an exact comparison but it's close enough to give some perspective.

That's simply not true. I have been daily driving asahi for 2.5 years or so now on an M2 Max macbook. In it's been one of the most reliable and smooth experiences I have had ever using linux. DP alt made is working fine for me. I'm not sure about battery, I never measured.

I've been using my 16" MacBook Pro with M2 Max and 32 GB of RAM, 1 TB of SSD, for more than 2 years and I feel or see no reason to upgrade. At least not until there's an external design refresh. But maybe I'll get the M5 Max just for the heck of it. Mostly because it'd be a pain to move all the data and state (the Time Machine or Mac-to-Mac transfer is not always perfect and hands-free in my experience) They're just too good for their own good.

After having to get a windows laptop for work - I'm still in awe of my old M2 Max.. Apple makes the best general laptops out there by a wide margin

I have a Mac Studio M2 Max as my main driver. It's fantastic. I will get the best M5 Studio I can afford when the higher RAM options come out because I am very involved with local inference. I find that with Tailscale I can either use screen sharing if I've got a good enough internet connection or just SSH and Mosh if it's a little bit laggy. That has been good enough for me. A Mac Studio and a Neo as a companion is a really good combination. My laptop is an Apple M4 Air but it basically does nothing except for running ScreenShare and a terminal.

Same, although my M1 pro has only 16 GB of RAM and that does seem to slow it down a bit with my current usage. I recently bought a used Mac Studio M2 Max with 64 GB RAM and it's much faster, both subjectively and objectively by looking at how long it takes to run the full test suite of the Rails app I'm working on.

That’s a fair point. The most I use my laptop for is some local LLM processing. I’d have more headroom on a desktop, for sure, but 96GB M2 max has plenty of oomph for my needs. Maybe I’m underestimating how many power users there are. For my day job I tend to offload most of my work onto a big server anyway so I could probably get by with a Neo at this point.

Isn't that switch basically a downgrade? You get some more single core performance and some weight savings, but also a worse (and smaller) screen, less multicore performance, less GPU performance, less video encoding performance and a smaller battery? I'm on an M2 Max myself, and glad they introduced a larger form factor Air, but it seems like a long way from an upgrade.

Mac Studio? I'm on an M2 Max and looks like I'll be holding onto this thing for a few more generations.

I get it. I wish there were more great laptop makers. I had a maxed out 16in M2 Max MacBook Pro, now I have an 15in M3 MBA. I also have a maxed out HP G1A Ultra running Fedora. They’re all excellent.

I made my M2 Max generate a biryani recipe for me last night with 64gb ram and the baseline qwen3.5:35b model. I used the newest ollama with MLX. https://gist.github.com/kylehotchkiss/8f28e6c75f22a56e8d2d31... Under 3 minutes to get all that. The thinking is amusing, my laptop got quite warm, but for a 35b model on nearly 4 year old hardware, I see the light. This is the future.

Agreed. The real value proposition of Apple Silicon for local inference is running models that won't fit on consumer GPUs. I run Qwen 70B 4-bit on an M2 Max 96GB through llama.cpp and it's usable — not fast, but the unified memory means it actually loads. Would be interested to see MetalRT benchmarks at that scale, since the architectural advantages (fused kernels, reduced dispatch overhead) should matter more as models get memory-bandwidth-bound.

If anything, it's less, because you're giving up more RAM to the GPU. Which, I mean, I love unified memory, as one of those weirdos that does do local LLM stuff and am contemplating if it's time to upgrade my m2 max. But if you needed 32gb then you still need at least 32gb now. Unless swap on nvme disks is enough for you - and it isn't for me.

With a couple brief exceptions, I've been an iPhone user since 2007. I'm not far from switching to Android myself. I'm not under any illusions that Google doesn't have some serious flaws, in some ways definitely worse than Apple, but from a usability standpoint I do find the keyboard and autocorrect behavior just atrocious on my iPhone. It starts as annoyance, progresses to frustration, then overt anger at a lack of action from Apple. I'm at that last level now. They pulled their head out of their ass when the MBP evolved into a frustrating pile of crap, and I think my 14" M2 Max MBP is my favorite laptop ever. So they DO sometimes listen to their users. Now is the time to listen again.

Within minutes of each other I can read a bunch of comments about how an 8GB AI hat for RPi would be grand for LLMs, while another contingent points out that my M2 MAX 96GB MacBook is completely useless for LLMs. All I can say is at least the latter is also a great laptop.