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.
You'll be glad you did. I loved my 2015 MBP. I even drove 3 hours to the nearest Best Buy to snag one. That display was glorious. A fantastic machine. I eventually gave it to my sister, who continued using it until a few years ago. The battery was gone, but it still worked great.
When you upgrade, prepare to be astonished.
The performance improvement is difficult to convey. It's akin to traveling by horse and buggy. And then hopping into a modern jetliner, flying first class.
It's not just speed. Display quality, build quality, sound quality, keyboard quality, trackpad, ports, etc., have all improved considerably.
The performance jump between a top-of-the-line intel MBP (I don't remember the year, probably 2019) and the m1 max I got to replace it.. was rather like the perf jump between spinning disks and SSDs.
When I migrated all my laptops to SSDs (lenovos at the time, so it was drop-dead simple), I thought to myself, "this is a once-in-a-generation feeling". I didn't think I would ever be impressed by a laptop's speed ever again. It was nice to be wrong.
> The battery was gone, but it still worked great.
A family 2018 Macbook Air got a second life with a battery replacement. Cheap kit from Amazon, screwdrivers included, extremely easy to do. Still in use, no problems.
My 2015 15" MBP is also still kickin, is/was an absolutely fabulous unit. Was my work machine for 3-4 years, and now another almost-6 years as my personal laptop. My personal use case is obviously not very demanding but it's only now starting to really show its age.
I also have a M1 from work that is absolutely wonderful, but I think it's time for me to upgrade the 2015 with one of these new M4s.
Honestly, my Thinkpad from 2015 was still used in my family until recently. The battery was pretty bad, same as on my 2015 MBP, but other than that, I put Fedora on it, and it was still really fast.
Longevity is not only a thing of MBPs. OTOH, IIRC, some 2017-2019 MBPs (before the Mx switch) were terrible for longevity, given their problematic keyboard.
I was also a mid-2012 MBP user. I eventually got the M2 MBA because I was investing in my eyesight (modern displays are significantly better). I was never impressed with the touchbar-era macs, they didn't appeal to me and their keyboards were terrible.
I think this M-series macbook airs are a worthy successor to the 2012 MBP. I fully intend to use this laptop for at least the same amount of time, ideally more. The lack of replaceable battery will probably be the eventual killer, which is a shame.
That is amazing. Mine lasted for a super long time as well, and like you, I upgraded everything to its max. I think it was the last model with a 17 inch screen.
Sold mine last year for $100 to some dude who claimed to have some software that only runs on that specific laptop. I didn't question it.
I still have my 2015, and it lived just long enough to keep me going until the death of the touch bar and horrible keyboard, which went away when I immediately bought the M1 Pro on release day.
I used that same model for 5 years until I finally upgraded in 2017 and totally regretted it, the upgrade was not worth it at all, I would have been just as happy with the 2012. I quickly replaced it again with the "Mea Culpa" 2019 where they added back in ports, etc, would have been just about worth the upgrade over the 2012, 7 years later, but again, not by a big margin.
The 2012 MBP 15" Retina was probably the only machine I bought where the performance actually got better over the years, as the OS got more optimized for it (the early OS revisions had very slow graphics drivers dealing with the retina display)
The M1 Pro on the other hand, that was a true upgrade. Just a completely different experience to any Apple Intel laptop.
I was considering upgrading to an M3 up until about a month ago when Apple replaced my battery, keyboard, top case, and trackpad completely for free. An upgrade would be nice as it no longer supports the latest MacOS, but at this point, I may just load Ubuntu on the thing and keep using it for another few years. What a machine.
I've just replaced a 2012 i5 mbp, and used it for Dev work and presentations into 2018.
It has gotten significantly slower the last 2 years, but the more obvious issue is the sound, inability to virtual background, and now lack of software updates.
But if you had told me I'd need to replace it in 2022 I wouldn't believe you
Ah my 2013 mbp died in 2019. It was the gpu. No way to repair it for cheap enough so I had to replace it with a 2019 mbp which was the computer I kept the shortest (I hated the keyboard).
How do you justify this kind of recurring purchases, even with selling your old device? I don't get the behaviour or the driving decision factor past the obvious "I need the latest shiny toy" (I can't find the exact words to describe it, so apologies for the reductive description).
I have either assembled my own desktop computers or purchased ex corporate Lenovo over the years with a mix of Windows (for gaming obviously) and Linux and only recently (4 years ago) been given a MBP by work as they (IT) cannot manage Linux machines like they do with MacOS and Windows.
I have moved from an intel i5 MBP to a M3 Pro (?) and it makes me want to throw away my dependable ThinkPad/Fedora machine I still uses for personal projects.
I spend easily 100 hours a week using it not-as-balanced-as-it-should-be between the two.
I don't buy them because I need something new, I buy them because in the G4/Intel era, the iterations were massive and even a 20 or 30% increase in speed (which could be memory, CPU, disk -- they all make things faster) results in me being more productive. It's worth it for me to upgrade immediately when apple releases something new, as long as I have issues with my current device and the upgrade is enough of a delta.
M1 -> M2 wasn't much of a delta and my M1 was fine.
M1 -> M3 was a decent delta, but, my M1 was still fine.
M1 -> M4 is a huge delta (almost double) and my screen is dented to where it's annoying to sit outside and use the laptop (bright sun makes the defect worse), so, I'm upgrading. If I hadn't dented the screen the choice would be /a lot/ harder.
I love ThinkPads too. Really can take a beating and keep on going. The post-IBM era ones are even better in some regards too. I keep one around running Debian for Linux-emergencies.
There are 2 things I was always spending money on, if I felt is not the almost best achievable: my bed and my laptop. Even the phone can be 4 years old iPhone, but the laptop must be best and fast. My sleep is also pretty important. Everything else is just "eco".
In my country you can buy a device and write off in 2 years, VAT reimbursed, then scrap it from the books and you sell it to people without tax payed to people who otherwise would pay a pretty hefty VAT. This decreases your loss of value to like half.
It's tax avoidance, not evasion. If it's fully legal then I don't know why wouldn't you recommend it. If you are against it, you can easily pay more in taxes than required yourself.
Apple has a pretty good trade-in program. If you have an Apple card, it's even better (e.g. the trade-in value is deducted immediately, zero interest, etc.).
Could you get more money by selling it? Sure. But it's hard to be the convenience. They ship you a box. You seal up the old device and drop it off at UPS.
I also build my desktop computers with a mix of Windows and Linux. But those are upgraded over the years, not regularly.
>I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1
What different lives we live. This first M1 was in November 2020. Not even four years old. I’ve never had a [personal] computer for _less_ time than that. (Work, yes, due to changing jobs or company-dictated changes/upgrades)
Exactly my thoughts. I don't understand whether I'm really spoiled, or is the crowd here weird about upgrading for some reason - if you have a laptop from 4-5 years ago, the new one would be 2-5x faster in vast majority of things - even if not critical for your workflow, it would feel SO MUCH nicer - so if it's something you use for 100h / week, shouldn't you try to make it as enjoyable as reasonably possible?
Other example - I'm by no means rich, but I have a $300 mechanical keyboard - it doesn't make me type faster and it doesn't have additional functionality to a regular $30 Logitech one - but typing on it feels so nice and I spend so much of my life doing it, that to me it's completely justified and needed to have this one then.
That’s a feature, not a bug, for some. When I upgraded to an M series chip MacBook, I had to turn up the heat because I no longer had my mini space heater.
> I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1.
I still have a running Thinkpad R60 from 2007, a running Thinkpad T510 from 2012, and a modified running Thinkpad X61 (which I re-built as an X62 using the kit from 51nb in 2017 with a i7-5600U processor, 32 GB of RAM and a new display) in regular use. The latter required new batteries every 2 years, but was my main machine until 2 weeks ago when I replaced it with a ThinkCentre. During their time as my main machine, each of these laptops was actively used around 100 hours per week, and was often running for weeks without shutdown or reboot. The only thing that every broke was the display of the R60 which started to show several green vertical bars after 6 years, but replacement was easy.
I've spilled liquid on my MacBook's once every 10 years on average. Last in 2014, then again last month. Accidents happen.
As I've noted in a sibling comment, I'll probably stop purchasing mobile Macs until the repair story on Macbooks is improved -- the risk for accidents and repairs is simply much higher on portable machines. That's only going to happen through third-party repair (which I think would simultaneously lead Apple to lower their first-party repair costs, too).
Interesting. I have found occasion to use it for pretty much every Mac I've owned since the 1980s! I'm not sure how much money it's saved compared to just paying for repairs when needed, but I suspect it may come out to:
1) a slight overall savings, though I'm not sure about that.
2) a lack of stress when something breaks. Even if there isn't an overall savings, for me it's been worth it because of that.
Certainly, my recent Mac repair would have cost $1500 and I only paid $300, and I think I've had the machine for about 3 years, so there's a savings there but considerably less recent stress. That's similar to the experience I've had all along, although this recent expense would have probably been my most-expensive repair ever.
"SSD is soldered on" is a bit of glossing over of the issue with the M-series Macs.
Apple is putting raw NAND chips on the board (and yes soldering them) and the controller for the SSD is part of the M-series chip. Yes, apple could use NVMe here if you ignore the physical constraints and ignore fact that it wouldn't be quite as fast and ignore the fact that it would increase their BOM cost.
I'm not saying Apple is definitively correct here, but, it's good to have choice and Apple is the only company with this kind of deeply integrated design. If you want a fully modular laptop, go buy a framework (they are great too!) and if you want something semi-modular, go buy a ThinkPad (also great!).
I need macOS for work. Now that the writing is on the wall for Hackintosh (which I used to do regularly while purchasing a Mac every few years, most recently in 2023 and 2018, because I love that choice), I don't have a choice. I used to spend 10-20 hours per third party machine for that choice.
I don't truly mind that they solder on the SSD, embed the controller into the processor -- you're right that it's great we have choice here. I mind the exuberant repair cost _on top of_ Apple's war on third party repair. Apple is the one preventing me to have choice here, I have to do the repair through them, or wait until schematics are smuggled out of China and used/broken logic boards are available so that the repair costs what it should: $300 to replace 2 chips on my logic board (still mostly labor, but totally a fair price).
I love Apple for their privacy focus and will continue to support them because I need to do Mac and iOS development, but I will likely stop buying mobile workstations from them for this reason, the risk of repair is simply much higher and not worth this situation.
Yeah, I always have AppleCare. I view it as part of the cost of a mac (or iPhone).
And yeah, this incident reminded me of why it's important to back up as close to daily as you can, or even more often during periods when you're doing important work and want to be sure you have the intermediate steps.
Mine fell off from the roof of a moving car at highway speeds and subsequently spent 30 mins being run over by cars until it was picked back up. Otherwise no complaints.
I had an 2019 i9 for a work laptop. It was absolutely awful, especially with the corporate anti-virus / spyware on it that brought it to a crawl. Fans would run constantly. Any sort of Node JS build would make it sound like a jet engine.
That was the worst laptop I've ever had. Not only was it turning the jet engines on when you tried to do something more demanding that moving mouse around, it throttled thermally so much that you literally could not move that mouse around.
I have the OG 13" MBP M1, and it's been great; I only have two real reasons I'm considering jumping to the 14" MBP M4 Pro finally:
- More RAM, primarily for local LLM usage through Ollama (a bit more overhead for bigger models would be nice)
- A bit niche, but I often run multiple external displays. DisplayLink works fine for this, but I also use live captions heavily and Apple's live captions don't work when any form of screen sharing/recording is enabled... which is how Displaylink works. :(
Not quite sold yet, but definitely thinking about it.
Yep. That's roughly 20% per generation improvement which ain't half-bad these days, but the really huge cliff was going from Intel to the M1 generation.
M1 series machines are going to be fine for years to come.
It feels like M1 was the revolution, subsequent ones evolution - smaller fabrication process for improved energy efficiency, more cores for more power, higher memory (storage?) bandwidth, more displays (that was a major and valid criticism for the M1 even though in practice >1 external screens is a relatively rare use case for <5% of users).
Actually wasn't M1 itself an evolution / upscale of their A series CPUS that by now they've been working on since... before 2010, the iPhone 4 was the first one with their own CPU, although the design was from Samsung + Intrinsity, it was only the A6 that they claimed was custom designed by Apple.
In early 2020, I had an aging 2011 Air that was still struggling after a battery replacement. Even though I "knew" the Apple Silicon chips would be better, I figured a 2020 Intel Air would last me a long time anyway, since my computing needs from that device are light, and who knows how many years the Apple Silicon transition will take take anyway?
Bought a reasonably well-specced Intel Air for $1700ish. The M1s came out a few months later. I briefly thought about the implication of taking a hit on my "investment", figured I might as well cry once rather than suffer endlessly. Sold my $1700 Intel Air for $1200ish on craigslist (if I recall correctly), picked up an M1 Air for about that same $1200 pricepoint, and I'm typing this on that machine now.
That money was lost as soon as I made the wrong decision, I'm glad I just recognized the loss up front rather than stewing about it.
Exact same boat here. A friend and I both bought the 2020 Intel MBA thinking that the M1 version was at least a year out. It dropped a few months later. I immediately resold my Intel MBA seeing the writing on the wall and bought a launch M1 (which I still use to this day). Ended up losing $200 on that mis-step, but no way the Intel version would still get me through the day.
That said...scummy move by Apple. They tend to be a little more thoughtful in their refresh schedule, so I was caught off guard.
When I saw the M1s come out, I thought that dev tooling would take a while to work for M1, which was correct. It probably took a year for most everything to be compiled for arm64. However I had too little faith in Rosetta and just the speed upgrade M1 really brought. So what I mean to say is, I still have that deadweight MBA that I only use for web browsing :)
Oh yes, my wife bought a new Intel MBA in summer 2020... I told her at the time Apple planned its own chip, but it couldn't be much better than the Intel one and surely Apple will increase prices too... I was so wrong.
Bought the same machine from the same store last December, been using it ever since with a big grin on my face. I'll probably consider upgrading in 2028 or later.
I still use my MacBook Air M1 and given my current workloads (a bit of web development, general home office use and occasional video editing and encoding) I doubt I’ll need to replace it in the coming 5 years. That’ll be an almost 10 year lifespan.
It's a very robust and capable small laptop. I'm typing this to a M1 Macbook Air.
The only thing to keep in mind, is that the M1 was the first CPU in the transition from Intel CPUs (+ AMD GPUs) to Apple Silicon. The M1 was still missing a bunch of things from earlier CPUs, which Apple over time added via the M1 Pro and other CPUs. Especially the graphics part was sufficient for a small laptop, but not for much beyond. Better GPUs and media engines were developed later. Today, the M3 in a Macbook Air or the M4 in the Macbook Pro have all of that.
For me the biggest surprise was how well the M1 Macbook Air actually worked. Apple did an outstanding job in the software & hardware transition.
I switched from a 2014 MacBook pro to a 2020 M1 MacBook Air, yeah the CPU is much faster, but the build quality and software is a huge step backwards. The trackpad is feels fake, not nearly as responsive, keyboard also feel not as solid. But now I'm already used to it.
They also feel very bulky/innelegant while still being fragile for the most part and not really hitting workstation level territory.
I don't understand how people are enamored with those things, sure it's better in some way than what it was before but it's also very compromised for the price.
With whisky i feel like id never need anything else. That said, the benchmark jump in the m4 has me thinking i should save up and grab a refurb in a year or two
M1 Pro compared to Intel was so big step ahead that I suppose we all are still surprised and excited. Quiet, long battery life and better performance. By a lot!
I wonder if M4 really feels that much faster and better - having M1 Pro I'm not going to change quickly, but maybe Mac Mini will land some day.
Honestly it was a game changer. Before I'd never leave the house without a charger, nowadays I rarely bring it with me on office days, even with JS / front-end workloads.
(of course, everyone else has a macbook too, there's always someone that can lend me a charger. Bonus points that the newer macbooks support both magsafe and USB-C charging. Added bonus points that they brought back magsafe and HDMI ports)
Yep. Bought an M1 Max in 2021 and it still feels fast, battery lasts forever. I’m sure the M4 would be even quicker (Lightroom, for example) but there’s little reason to consider an upgrade any time soon.
I have the same one, but everyone I know with an M series Mac says the same thing. These are the first machines in a long time built to not only last a decade but be used for it.
I have the M1 MacBook Pro with MagSafe and I still charge it via USB C simply because I can't be bothered to carry around another cable when all of my other peripherals are USB C.
That's interesting, I don't use USB A at all whatsoever anymore, and frankly I don't use the SD card reader or HDMI port either. Maybe I should just get a MacBook Air 15" but I do like the 120 hz screen of the Pro models, that's the main reason I'm holding out.
It's the other way around, isn't it? MagSafe was removed in the 2016-2019 model years (not sure why; maybe to shave off another bit of thickness?), and then brought back in 2020 to MacBook Pro and 2022 to MacBook Air.
Personally, I practically never use MagSafe, because the convenience of USB C charging cables all over the house outweighs the advantages of MagSafe for me.
I too bought a 2020 MBA M1, it was great initially, but now seems like its getting throttled, same goes with my iPhoneX, I used to love Apple, but its just pathetic that they throttle older devices just to get users to upgrade.
I insist my 2020 Macbook M1 was the best purchase I ever made